L-H- HAMMOND- 
 
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 \j[2c<Ls3~<<^J-S * V 
 
Photo by Moffctt Studio, Chicago 
 BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 
 
IN THE VANGUARD 
 OF A RACE 
 
 BY L. H. HAMMOND 
 
 Author of The Master Word, In Black and White: 
 An Interpretation of Southern Life, etc. 
 
 Published jointly by 
 COUNCIL OF WOMEN FOR HOME MISSIONS 
 
 and 
 
 MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE 
 UNITED STATES AND CANADA 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
LOAN STACK 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE 
 COUNCIL OF WOMEN FOB HOME MISSIONS 
 
 AND 
 
 MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE 
 UNITED STATES AND CANADA 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
.. 
 
 TO THAT GREAT COMPANY OP NEGRO WOMEN, 
 BOND AND FREE, UNLETTERED AND COLLEGE- 
 BRED, WHOSE LIVING FAITH AND LOVING SAC 
 RIFICES HAVE CREATED AND ARE ENRICHING THE 
 IDEALS OF A RACE. 
 
 *} 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 
 PREFACE w ix 
 
 I A LONG ASCENT ...;.,.. 1 
 Introduction 
 
 II A STORY OP SERVICE . . . . . 16 
 Booker T. Washington and Robert R. Moton 
 
 III A DOCTOR OP MEDICINE . . . . .35 
 
 Dr. Charles V. Roman 
 
 IV SAVING AN IDEA ...... 47 
 
 Miss Nannie H. Burroughs 
 
 V A CITY PASTOR ...... 63 
 
 Dr. William N. DeBerry 
 
 VI A BELIEVER IN HAPPINESS . . . . 78 
 
 Mrs. Janie Porter Barrett 
 
 VII A BUILDER OP PROSPERITY . . > . 94 
 
 John B. Pierce 
 
 VIII A WOMAN BANKER . . . . . . 108 
 
 Mrs. Maggie L. Walker 
 
 IX "A COMPOSER BY DIVINE RIGHT" .- . 119 
 
 Harry T. Burleigh 
 
 X A LIGHT IN A DARK PLACE . : . . . 131 
 Miss Martha Drummer 
 
 XI SURE FOUNDATIONS . . .< .- . . 148 
 
 Rev. James H. Dunston 
 
 XII A SEED OF FLAME 162 
 
 Joseph S. Cotter, Jr. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Booker T. Washington . . Frontispiece 
 
 Tuskegee Institute 32 
 
 Dr. Roman s clinic 40 
 
 Miss Nannie H. Burroughs 48 
 
 Dr. DeBerry and his staff . . . . . 64 
 
 Mrs. Janie Porter Barrett . . . . . 80 
 
 John B. Pierce 96 
 
 Mrs. Walker s office force 112 
 
 Harry T. Burleigh 128 
 
 Miss Martha Drummer and her school . . . 144 
 
 Rev. James H. Dunston 160 
 
 Joseph S. Cotter, Jr 168 
 
PREFACE 
 
 PERHAPS the most striking feature of this book 
 is what is not in it. The material for it was 
 sharply limited by reason of the necessity for 
 keeping it within the size and price of the series 
 to which it belongs. Any general survey of Negro 
 literary, artistic, educational, or business achieve 
 ments was prohibited by its biographical form, in 
 which it adheres to the method adopted for a 
 group of books already issued. 
 
 Unless the telling of their stories does them 
 injustice, the men and women whose biographies 
 are included in this book are manifestly worthy 
 of the rank accorded them. But any one ac 
 quainted with Negro life <3an furnish a much 
 longer list of members of the race quite as dis 
 tinguished as those here given with the exception 
 of a very few preeminent names. 
 
 I have felt especially the limitations in regard 
 to the artistic side of Negro life. Mr. Burleigh, 
 the musician chosen, speaks for himself ; yet there 
 are so many others of whom the race may well be 
 proud. Among painters there are E. M. Banister, 
 one of whose pictures was awarded a medal at the 
 Centennial Exposition of 1876 ; W. E. Scott, whose 
 picture, The Poor Neighbor, was purchased by 
 the Argentine Eepublic, and who has done mural 
 paintings for many public buildings in Illinois; 
 
 ix 
 
x Preface 
 
 and Henry O. Tanner, foremost of them all, who 
 is a frequent exhibitor in the Paris Salon. Sev 
 eral of the latter s paintings have been purchased 
 by the French Government and placed in the 
 Luxembourg. 
 
 The honors as sculptors are with the women. 
 Edmonia Lewis s work was accepted for the Cen 
 tennial Exposition ; Mrs. Meta Warrick Fuller has 
 exhibited in the Paris Salon and executed a group 
 for the Jamestown Exposition; and Mrs. May 
 Howard Jackson has won high praise from art 
 critics for work exhibited in the Corcoran Art 
 Gallery, Washington. 
 
 Among actors, none who have seen him will for 
 get Charles Gilpin, who drew thousands of white 
 people to his extraordinary presentation in New 
 York of "The Emperor Jones/ and whose work 
 was listed by the American Drama League among 
 the ten outstanding achievements of the American 
 stage in 1921. 
 
 The list of singers is long and notable. It in 
 cludes Eoland Hayes, who has won success in 
 Europe as well as in America, and who was re 
 cently presented with a jeweled pin by King 
 George of England as a token of appreciation of 
 his art. Joseph Douglass and Clarence White are 
 both well-known violinists, the latter having also 
 won distinction as a composer. One passes Cole 
 ridge-Taylor, most distinguished of them all, only 
 because he belongs to England rather than to 
 
Preface xi 
 
 America, yet, like Dumas and Pushkin, he belongs 
 to the Negro race. 
 
 So with the other groups ; the men and women 
 written of are representative of classes. The con 
 sciousness of this large and growing body of lead 
 ers should be the mental background against which 
 should be set the individual achievements here 
 related. 
 
 One thing which will doubtless strike the reader 
 is the frequency with which, at some vital turning- 
 point in the lives narrated, the mother s character 
 and influence have been deciding factors. These 
 mothers are typical of unnumbered thousands 
 from every level of opportunity, whose standards 
 of faith, conscience, and self-forgetfulness have 
 shaped those of the race and are a light upon the 
 long, hard path which it must climb in the years 
 to come. They show the Negro women bearing 
 their share of the responsibility of womanhood to 
 the Eace of Man. The creation of ideals, plant 
 ing them in the hearts of children, unfolding and 
 enriching them from generation to generation 
 this, the biggest and finest of all human tasks, is 
 preeminently the work of the women of every race. 
 Like all the big, essential things of life, it may be 
 achieved by common folk because it is primarily 
 of the heart and not of the head. We have per 
 verted the original meaning of the fine old word 
 "common" into something to be regarded as in 
 ferior; but the things which are common to the 
 
xii Preface 
 
 "Pace of Man and to the individuals of all races 
 e the most precious possessions of every race, 
 .uiowever wide and deep the separation of the low 
 est savage from the most highly developed man, 
 science and religion alike declare that the things 
 which they hold in common and which separate 
 them both from all other creatures are wider and 
 deeper yet. 
 
 The deepest of all our common possessions is 
 a capacity for God. This the Negro brought with 
 him from Africa ; and it was chiefly the Christian 
 white women of America, and especially those of 
 the South, who kindled in the Negro women s souls 
 that which this capacity awaited the light of 
 Christian ideals. Notwithstanding the evils and 
 wrongs of slavery, in thousands of kitchens, 
 nurseries, and sewing-rooms the house-servants 
 of the old days found God through their mis 
 tresses lives and took up their predestined task 
 of making Him real and lovable to their own peo 
 ple by living in His spirit from day to day. 
 
 So the race advanced, in slavery and through 
 it. To-day the broadening opportunities of its 
 leading women are quickening its progress; yet 
 the humbler women still bear their vital part in 
 the movement. When we think how few genera 
 tions ago these Negro women had to begin at the 
 beginning, and of the ages through which our own 
 women have been lifting our ideals, we must ad 
 mit that the Negro women are entitled, not only 
 
Preface xiii 
 
 to our sympathy, but to our respect and coopera 
 tion. The advance of both races largely depends 
 upon the extent to which this respect and coopera 
 tion are given henceforth. In a book like this, only 
 glimpses can be given of the growing recognition 
 of this fact by both white and colored women ; but 
 it is the biggest and most hopeful of all the hope 
 ful facts in the wide field of interracial relations 
 to-day. 
 
 The authorities for the historical and scientific 
 statements made in the first chapter of the book 
 are Green s Short History of the English People, 
 Hallam s Middle Ages, Campbell s The Puritan in 
 England, Holland and America, Wells s Outline 
 of History, Kipling s Short History of England, 
 and Scott Elliot s Prehistoric Man. 
 
 For various statements in regard to the Negroes 
 and interracial relations before the Civil War, the 
 writer has referred to Washington s Story of the 
 American Negro, Brawley s Short History of the 
 American Negro, Helper s The Impending Crisis, 
 an anti-slavery book by a white North Carolinian 
 published four years before the Civil War, and the 
 Negro Year Book, compiled by Monroe N. Work, 
 
 f Tuskegee Institute. 
 
 In conclusion, I would thank the following 
 
 j mends and helpers for information, advice, and 
 
 many kindnesses in the preparation of my book: 
 
 Miss Ida A. Tourtellot of the Phelps-Stokes Foun- 
 
xiv Preface 
 
 dation, Miss Flora Mitchell of the "Woman s Home 
 Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church, Mrs. Booker T. "Washington of Tuskegee, 
 Mr. Jackson Davis of the General Education 
 Board, Mr. N. C. Newbold of the North Carolina 
 State Department of Education, Mr. W. T. B. 
 Williams of the Jeanes and Slater Boards, Pro 
 fessor G. Lake Lnes of Tuskegee, and Dr. A. M. 
 Moore of Durham, North Carolina. 
 
 L. H. HAMMOND 
 
 1922. 
 
IN THE VANGUARD OF A RACE 
 
A LONG ASCENT 
 
 Slow moves the pageant of a climbing race. 
 Paul Laurence Dunbar 
 
 BETWEEN fifteen and sixteen hundred years 
 ago England was a rich and peaceful coun 
 try with many prosperous cities connected 
 by splendid roads. Ships from all parts of the 
 known world came to her harbors bringing rich 
 cargoes and carrying back grain, wool, furs, and 
 tin. Churches stood in many towns, and the 
 homes of the wealthy dotted the country. These 
 homes were built of stone and marble, with beau 
 tiful gardens about them. They were heated by 
 furnaces and piped for running water which 
 flowed into splendid marble baths and fountains. 
 The law of Rome ruled from the Channel to Sol- 
 way Firth and had ruled, unopposed, for two hun 
 dred and fifty years. The island, prosperous and 
 increasingly Christian, was part of the highest 
 civilization the world had ever known, for Eome, 
 after her fashion, had first conquered the wild 
 heathen Britons mercilessly, and then tamed and 
 taught them and blessed them with peace and pros 
 perity. 
 
 Then came the pirates, swooping down before 
 the north wind in their queer little ships, each 
 oarsman bent on plunder and ready for any 
 
 i 
 
2 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 cruelty to obtain it. Huge, red-haired, blue-eyed 
 fellows they were, these English ancestors of ours, 
 heathen barbarians every one, bold, cruel, and 
 bloodthirsty. Their gods were like themselves, 
 and they believed in a heaven to which only those 
 who died in battle could go and in which they 
 could drink and boast of their bold deeds forever. 
 
 Britain was a fat and fertile land, and these 
 Angles meant to have it; but they wanted no 
 Britons in it, and they left none. The churches 
 and priests they especially hated, burning the 
 former and slaying the latter on their own altars. 
 They destroyed the beautiful country houses and 
 left city after city a heap of ruins "without fire, 
 without light, without songs. " 
 
 For fifty years they fought and pillaged and 
 butchered and made slaves. By that time all the 
 eastern half of England was theirs. It took them 
 a hundred and fifty more years to root out the 
 last Britons, for the dark little folk fought bravely 
 and long ; but at last they were all gone, and with 
 them civilization and Christianity. Britain was 
 England now, a wild heathen country where our 
 forefathers lived in rude huts open to the weather. 
 They ate and drank like gluttons and fought one 
 another like wild beasts. 
 
 They lived in little villages made up of kins 
 folk, with marshes or forests around them, or per 
 haps both, as a protection from the men of other 
 villages whose pirate instincts might set them on 
 
A Long Ascent 3 
 
 the war-path against their neighbors. They had 
 very few horses and plowed with oxen. They 
 raised sheep for wool and cattle for plowing. 
 Their usual meat came from their droves of hogs. 
 Each village had a swineherd who took all the 
 pigs to the forest every day, where they could 
 root for acorns and other food. 
 
 A stranger was always considered an enemy 
 until he proved himself a friend, and often, to 
 be on the safe side, they killed him anyway, and 
 bothered no more about him. After a while 
 a law was made that when a stranger came to the 
 woods or marsh about a village, he should blow 
 a horn to show that he came honestly and openly, 
 not trying to sneak in to murder or rob. If he 
 failed to blow a horn or if nobody heard him blow, 
 he was to be killed on sight. 
 
 A hundred years after these savage men came 
 to Britain, it was written of them that they were 
 " barbarians, " "wolves," "dogs," "whelps from 
 the kennels of barbarism," "hateful to God and 
 man." In France and Spain and Italy when bar 
 barians overthrew the power of Eome, they settled 
 down among the cultivated people they had con 
 quered, learned their language, adopted their laws 
 and customs, and took on civilized ways ; but the 
 men who came to England made a clean sweep of 
 all these things. They did not even keep many of 
 the Britons alive as slaves, they made slaves of 
 one another. When village fought with village 
 
4 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 or, long afterward, when one little king whom the 
 growing tribes set up fought another, the captives, 
 nobles and slaves alike, were made slaves by their 
 captors. Sometimes they were taken to their con 
 queror s home, or, frequently, they were sold to 
 pirate vessels that carried them to the slave- 
 markets of southern Europe. 
 
 It was the sight of some of these English slaves 
 put up for sale in Italy that led to missionaries 
 being sent once more to what had been Christian 
 Britain, and which was now heathen for a second 
 time. Missionaries came, too, from Ireland, at 
 this time one of the brightest spots in a dark and 
 troubled world. Eoman Britain had furnished 
 many Christian martyrs when the savage Eng 
 lishmen first came, and now Irish and Eoman 
 Christians came to this wild and cruel land, not 
 counting their lives dear to themselves if only they 
 could win the heathen to the gospel. 
 
 It took two hundred years to establish Chris 
 tianity firmly on the island, for now and again 
 there would occur relapses into heathenism when 
 some petty king arose who preferred to worship 
 Odin rather than Christ. 
 
 Sometimes we hear people say that foreign 
 missions to-day accomplish very little in China 
 or India or Japan. See how few Christians those 
 countries have, they say, after trying for a hun 
 dred years to convert them! That is not quite 
 
r A Long Ascent 5 
 
 true, for it is not much over a hundred years 
 since the pioneer of modern missions in China, 
 Eobert Morrison, went there. At that time most 
 Christian people who knew about him thought him 
 crazy, or silly, at best, and for long years the 
 Church did almost nothing for missions. It is only 
 in the last fifty years that it has made any great 
 effort as a whole. Fifty years among hundreds 
 of millions of heathen ! 
 
 In the days when the Eoman and Irish mis 
 sionaries came to Britain, the English could have 
 been counted by only the hundred thousand. 
 Even a thousand years after missionaries came to 
 England, there were only five or six million peo 
 ple in the whole country about as many as in 
 the city of New York to-day. Yet it took two hun 
 dred years to make our ancestors Christian, even 
 in name. We should remember this when we feel 
 like criticizing people of other races whose prog 
 ress we think is slow. And we should think of it, 
 too, when people ask if missions pay. Has it paid 
 to have a Christian England in the world? 
 
 For a long time a tribe was Christian or heathen 
 only as its "king" ordered it out either for bap 
 tism or for worship of Odin. However, some of 
 these early Englishmen made noble Christians. 
 But it was not until Elizabeth became queen, a 
 thousands years later, that Christianity had gone 
 deep enough for the people to take such a stand 
 for the open Bible that their rulers did not dare 
 
6 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 to forbid it to them or to kill those who disobeyed. 
 And so, all down the centuries are scattered the 
 shining names of those who greatly lived or 
 greatly died for the love of Jesus Christ. 
 
 They were splendidly brave, these early Eng 
 lishmen. They always had been brave, even as 
 savages, with a rough, cruel, selfish courage, but 
 now they were brave for finer reasons. It was 
 not only for personal gain and glory that Drake 
 sailed unknown and dreaded seas and carried the 
 flag of England around the world. It was with 
 no thought of self that Philip Sidney fought free 
 dom s battle in Holland, or that he refused, in 
 his dying agony, to relieve his own raging thirst 
 that the water might be given to one suffering 
 more than he. It was a glorious day when little 
 England faced the great Spanish Armada to die, 
 if need be, for God and freedom. Nor can any of 
 English blood forget Ridley and Latimer and all 
 that noble army of martyrs who, in Mary s time, 
 passed through the fire up to God rather than deny 
 their faith. The barbarians had come far in a 
 thousand years. 
 
 But Christian though they had become in Eliza 
 beth s time, there were still many of their ways 
 and thoughts which seem neither civilized nor 
 Christian to us who live over three hundred years 
 later. A climbing race moves slowly, and behind 
 the shining banners of those who lead skulk ugly 
 things and wicked and stupid things which most 
 
A Long Ascent 7 
 
 of the people do not yet know are ugly or stupid 
 or wicked, and so permit them. Along with 
 all the noble things and the splendid intellectual 
 power of Elizabeth s reign went others, disgust 
 ing and barbarous after a thousand years ! Pun 
 ishments were many and horrible. Mutilation, 
 torture, and death were meted out for petty of 
 fenses. The sight of bodies hanging by the road 
 side and falling into decay was not uncommon. 
 The people lived in filth. Garbage and sewage 
 were habitually emptied into the middle of Lon 
 don s streets, where it rotted and bred disease and 
 smelled to heaven. The people had very little 
 knowledge of washing their bodies. The queen 
 had three thousand dresses ; but most people had 
 only one and wore that one day and night till it 
 dropped to rags. Underclothes, if worn, were 
 never washed. Few, even of the rich, had carpets, 
 and those they had were used for table-covers. 
 The floors were of dirt or, in grand houses, of 
 wood or stone covered with rushes into which 
 bones and other refuse of meals were thrown as 
 people sat at table. Forks were just beginning to 
 be known among the wealthy, anc? it was quite 
 proper to eat with one s fingers and dip them into 
 the dishes as well. Chimneys began to come into 
 use at about this time. Before this, smoke got 
 out as best it could at openings in the walls! 
 These openings, which were without glass, let in 
 both the light and the weather. 
 
8 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 Some of the prevailing ideas of justice were 
 much more like those of our pirate ancestors than 
 like our own. The men who first made England 
 famous on the seas were freebooters and traders 
 in human flesh. Many of the great fortunes piled 
 up in the last half of Elizabeth s reign were made 
 by seizing unarmed ships of friendly countries 
 even those of Protestant Holland and appro 
 priating their cargoes. Hawkins, one of the sea- 
 heroes of his day, began England s slave-trade 
 with a cargo of Negroes he kidnaped on the Afri 
 can coast and sold in the West Indies. This traffic 
 was legal in England and in America until a little 
 over a hundred years ago. The last serfs of Eng 
 lish blood in England were freed by Elizabeth in 
 1574, but long after that, Englishmen were 
 shipped to the American colonies and sold as 
 slaves as a punishment for crime or for political 
 offenses. 
 
 Over three hundred years have passed since 
 these conditions prevailed, and the higher a na 
 tion climbs, the faster it can go. We have come 
 further, as a people, in the last three hundred 
 years than in the previous thousand years. Who 
 can say what heights are ahead? Would any of 
 those Christian Britons have believed when 
 Roman civilization was being blotted out by the 
 English barbarians that that same race would one 
 day stand as one of the world s great bulwarks of 
 justice among men, creators of wonders beyond 
 
A Long Ascent 9 
 
 the dreams of magic, with ideals that reached the 
 stars? Yet all this we have seen come to pass 
 in England and in America in these last few years. 
 We are yet far from where we would be. There 
 are wrongs and injustices still to give way before 
 God s laws of justice and kindness rule us all. 
 How soon this comes to pass depends largely on 
 the young people now coming into power. If we 
 assume that our own race is already on the 
 heights, it will never attain its highest possible 
 plane through help of ours. If we forget our own 
 slow and incomplete progress as a race or despise 
 others who are climbing the same hard and painful 
 path, we shall be, not lifters of mankind, but a 
 stumbling block in the path of the human race. 
 
 The part of Africa best known to us is the little 
 strip around the Mediterranean Sea. But this, 
 so far as we can tell, was not settled by Negroes, 
 but by peoples who came out of Asia in widely- 
 separated times. South of these lands lived the 
 Negroes, of whose life at that time little is known. 
 Few explorations have been made south of Egypt, 
 though at one point, Zimbabwe, the ruins of a van 
 ished civilization have been found. 
 
 For hundreds of years the upper western coast 
 of Africa was raided by white pirates, most of 
 them English, and the people were kidnaped and 
 sold as slaves. Probably for thousands of years 
 east coast was raided in the same way by 
 
10 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 Arabs and other Asiatics, but except along the 
 coast, the continent was almost unknown to white 
 men until within the memory of men now living. 
 Between 1850 and 1900 the land was explored, and 
 European nations seized it for themselves as 
 though the people who had lived there for thou 
 sands of years had no rights in it at all. The only 
 parts of Africa still belonging to Negroes are 
 Abyssinia and the little country of Liberia. These 
 fifty years and the twenty following have seen 
 thousands of white men from Europe and Amer 
 ica flocking in missionaries, explorers, traders, 
 men bent on service and men bent on ruthless gain 
 - until Africa s geography and races are fairly 
 well known. 
 
 The oldest races are the pygmies of the Congo 
 and of South Africa. They are a queer little folk 
 who, Professor Elliot says in his Prehistoric Man, 
 "seem to have been the very first race to under 
 stand and realize the importance of botany. " 
 Their knowledge of plants is quite wonderful. 
 They are also "clever artists and musicians, and 
 may be the inventors of the first violin." But 
 they are a very savage little people for all that 
 and very deadly to their enemies by reason of 
 their cunningly-poisoned weapons. Between them 
 and the Zulus and people of Uganda, the most 
 highly developed of the many African races, are 
 peoples as varied as those of eastern Europe or 
 Asia and of many grades of intelligence. Many 
 
A Long Ascent 11 
 
 of them are clever iron-workers. In fact iron is 
 believed to have been made into tools and weapons 
 in Africa long before Europe learned its uses and 
 even while our own forefathers still had no tools 
 but flints. 
 
 But except for its sea-coasts, Africa has been 
 cut off for ages from the rest of the world. In 
 Europe and Asia men passed back and forth so 
 that what was learned in one place, sooner or later 
 became known in others. Isolated people can 
 not learn very fast, and Africa, in some respects 
 ahead of Europe when we were all savages to 
 gether, seems to have stood still while other coun 
 tries have forged far ahead of her. 
 
 Among Americans the first knowledge of Afri 
 cans came through the Negroes who had been 
 stolen from their homes by Dutch and English 
 pirates and sold in the colonies as slaves. Later, 
 Americans joined in this trade. It must be re 
 membered that Christian nations had no idea, in 
 those days, that they should behave like Christians 
 to savages. Wicked things went on because good 
 people did not understand it was their duty to 
 stop them. When some of the unjust things still 
 allowed by Christian people are put a stop to, it 
 will be by the same steps that ended first the 
 slave-trade and then slavery. 
 
 First a few people who best understood God s 
 thoughts of justice began to talk and write and 
 work against the slave-trade. They were mis- 
 
12 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 understood, laughed at, and abused just as are 
 the people who nowadays fight social abuses. But 
 they kept right on until more and more people 
 understood what was right, and then, in 1807, laws 
 were passed forbidding slave-trading in England 
 and America. Since that time England, where 
 only two hundred years before Christian Eng 
 lishmen had sold their own countrymen into slav 
 ery in the colonies, has led the world in trying to 
 end slavery everywhere. 
 
 In our country some people, North and South, 
 defended slavery by saying that the Negroes had 
 not sense enough to rise much above the animals, 
 and that God meant them to be ruled as such. But 
 the Negroes themselves proved this to be untrue. 
 From the very beginning, among the slaves 
 brought here from Africa were some gifted men 
 and women who showed unusual mental ability. 
 Phillis Wheatley, born in Africa, wrote a book 
 of poems which ran through three editions and! 
 won her recognition in England and America. Ira 
 Aldridge, whose father came from Africa, be 
 came an actor and was decorated by the Emper 
 ors of Austria and Russia and by the King of 
 Prussia. Edmund Kean, the great English 
 actor, played lago to his Othello. Sojourner 
 Truth, born in Africa, and Frederick Douglass, 
 born a slave in Maryland, both became famous 
 as speakers against slavery. Douglass was well 
 known in England, and in his later life he not 
 
A Long Ascent 13 
 
 only saw his great hope for his people realized, 
 but found himself their trusted leader. Harriet 
 Tubman, born a slave in Maryland, ran away 
 when about twenty years old; but instead of en 
 joying a peaceful freedom, she spent her life, 
 until the Civil War, in helping others of her 
 people to freedom, often at the cost of great 
 risk and hardship to herself. She showed an 
 ability, courage, and resourcefulness which 
 would have been remarkable anywhere. In the 
 Eevolutionary War, Negroes fought bravely, as 
 they have in every subsequent war of ours. 
 
 Many of the old slaves were noted for their 
 eloquence as preachers. John Chavis, of North 
 Carolina, was the first home missionary of the 
 Presbyterian Church; and John Stewart, who 
 went as a missionary to the Indians, is said to 
 have been the first missionary of the Methodist 
 Church. Caesar Blackwell, an Alabama slave, 
 was bought by the Alabama Baptist Convention 
 for $1,000. As he could not be set free, a white 
 man was made his guardian, and he was given 
 practical freedom, traveling with the white 
 preachers and helping them in their work. 
 Amanda Smith, another slave, became a great 
 evangelist, preaching not only in America, but in 
 England, India, and Africa. John Jasper, of 
 Eichmond, a slave for fifty-two years and a 
 preacher for sixty, had the respect of all Eich 
 mond, white and black; and Jack, another Vir- 
 
14 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 ginia slave, born in Africa, was considered by 
 men of both races the best preacher in his county. 
 Many white people were converted under him, 
 and plantation owners, instead of punishing their 
 slaves who did wrong, sent them to Jack to be 
 disciplined. The white people of his county 
 bought his freedom and gave him a house and 
 land, that he might give his whole time to his 
 work. Alexander Crummell, whose father was a 
 native African, graduated from Cambridge, Eng 
 land, and went to Africa as a missionary. After 
 ward he came back to America and was long the 
 rector of an Episcopal church in Washington. A 
 number of these old-time Negroes gained distinc 
 tion as composers of music and as singers, some 
 of them being recognized in Europe. 
 
 These and many others stand out from the 
 great mass of Negroes who were slaves in Amer 
 ica. But back of the more gifted folk is that 
 great throng whom the white people of the South 
 learned to love and trust : the men who gave their 
 masters honest service; the women who kept the 
 house, cared for the children, were faithful in all 
 things, and whose lives and teaching made Chris 
 tianity real to their little white charges. A race 
 that can keep faith in slavery, can keep faith in 
 freedom. There is proof enough from the days 
 of the early slave ships that among the captives 
 were men of business ability, of intelligence, and 
 of various and worthy gifts. But after all, the 
 
A Long Ascent 15 
 
 possibilities of a people cannot be measured 
 wholly or chiefly by their brains. Character is 
 worth far more, and where we find so much of it 
 among a people, we may be sure that as a race 
 they may yet go far. They need time and oppor 
 tunity. We ourselves, the scientists tell us, have 
 been learning some hundreds of thousands of 
 years ; yet as a people, we are only beginning to 
 learn that first great law of justice to love our 
 neighbors as ourselves. 
 
 We like to believe that the men and women of 
 loving hearts, noble minds, and heroic lives who 
 through the centuries stand out from the mass of 
 our own race, foreshadow the destiny of the race 
 itself when it has had full time for growth and 
 training. This book, in giving the life-stories of 
 a very few of our fellow-citizens of African 
 blood, would lead you to think of their race in 
 the same way. May you not only respect the> 
 achievements of to-day and yesterday, but see 
 them as f ore shado wings of the possibilities of a 
 people. How fast they climb will depend in large 
 part on us, on our faithfulness to our common 
 Lord, and on our obedience to His big, simple 
 laws of justice and kindness to all. 
 
II 
 
 A STORY OP SERVICE 
 
 D<>WN in Alabama is a, big school called Tus 
 kogoo Institute, covering 2,. N)0 acres of 
 hind. Then* are on the ground one him 
 <lrod and twonty buildings built mostly of brick, 
 with stone trimmings. Tim bricks wore made 
 and Mm buildings worn put up by MM* students, 
 hundreds of whom bavo in this way been able to 
 pay their way tbrougb HC.hnol. Without MfiH op 
 portunity, they could havn bad no education 
 worth lli- name. 
 
 There urn big brick dormitories and a groat 
 dining hall with windows on all sides and a. gal 
 lery whom, on state occasions, Mm Tuskogoo band 
 plays beautiful music. And the food in the big, 
 spot less kitchens! The mom sight of it, makes 
 the visitor V mouth water. There is a beautiful 
 chapel seating over two thousand poop In, with a 
 place for a, choir of live hundred, whose singing, 
 onoo hoard, is imvor forgotten thorn is not any 
 thing quite like it anywhere else. There is a 
 handsome library, a line hospital, buildings for 
 ! < S and industries of all kinds, a wonderful 
 pOWer-houso which supplies light and beat for 
 the wlmlo place, from the lamps that twinkle, at 
 
 Ml 
 
A til or u of Service 17 
 
 dusk over thn campus to thn nneessities of the 
 tfest of nil thn hi;-; buildings. 
 
 There in a Jar^n farm, with IwrnH for cattle, 
 horses, shnep, pitfs, poultry, and farm machinery. 
 Why, H < n- isn t room in this hook to tell about 
 nil (here is at Tuskegee, much less ahont all that 
 is -Ion.- lln-iv. HIM- must ,< and ;.< for OIK- ..If. 
 r rhe value of the whole plant is nearly two mil 
 lion dollars, and thn endowment nearly two mil 
 lion and a quarter more; and every penny is 
 wisely invested and yields wonderful return: . 
 
 These are thn things at Tuske^ee. Then- Is 
 also that which things are made to serve life in 
 thn making. Sitting on the r.hnprl platform, 
 looking into two thousand faces dark of skin yrl. 
 alight with ea#er, intelligent Interest, watching 
 lh- students march out, trim and spotless, with 
 heads erect and steady step, one sees heyond, 
 question that, like our own, thn Ne^ro is "a 
 
 students at Tuskegee o/ornn from most of 
 our stales, from thn West Indies, and from tho 
 countries of far off Africa, and they #o back to 
 all these, places to show in their daily livnn that 
 skilled bands should K with skilled brains and 
 that character and the spirit of service nrn thn 
 finest things in tho world. Tnskc^eo has trans 
 formed thousands of homnn and of livns. II hns 
 changed the people in whole stretches of country. 
 If has brought hope, knowledge, Bolf-r< 
 
18 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 thrift, independence, and happiness to thousands 
 all over the South. It has promoted friendship 
 and understanding between the races in every 
 Southern state. It is known and honored all over 
 the world, and educators and statesmen of many 
 races and countries travel thousands of miles to 
 see the Institute and learn its ways. 
 
 Now a great institution like this does not 
 spring up overnight like a mushroom. Where 
 did Tuskegee begin? 
 
 It began with a little black slave baby. His 
 mother, a slave in Virginia, could not read or 
 write and knew little of anything except cook 
 ing. She never could tell her little boy just when 
 he was born, but she thought it was in 1858 or 
 1859. 
 
 There were three children, and they and their 
 mother lived in a one-roomed cabin that had a 
 dirt floor, a rickety door with cracks all round 
 it, and holes in the walls instead of windows. 
 There was no furniture, and only rags on the 
 floor to sleep on. It was frightfully cold in win 
 ter almost like outdoors, and in summer it was 
 frightfully hot, for the mother had to cook for 
 all the slaves by a roaring log fire in the big fire 
 place. The children ate around a skillet, fishing 
 the food out with their fingers. They each wore 
 one little cotton garment. In short, their way of 
 living was quite like that of the red-haired, blue- 
 eyed pirates who came to Britain long ago. 
 
A Story of Service 19 
 
 The little boy had only one name Booker. 
 The Civil War ended when he was six or seven 
 years old. Already he had been at work for some 
 time. He helped clean the yard, carried water to 
 the men in the fields, fanned the flies off the white 
 folks table at meal-times, and carried corn to 
 the mill to be ground. He was so little that he 
 and his bag of corn had to be lifted on to the 
 horse. Often they would both slip off to the 
 road. Then Booker would have to wait, some 
 times for hours, till some one came along who 
 would take pity on the crying, frightened child 
 and put him and his bag on the horse again. 
 Often when he reached home, it was far into the 
 cold, black night, and he would still be terrified 
 from coming through the dark woods along the 
 road. 
 
 After freedom came, the family moved to West 
 Virginia, the little boy walking most of the long 
 mountainous way, and all of them sleeping by the 
 road at night. They went to Maiden, near 
 Charleston, where Booker s step-father, his older 
 brother John, and even Booker himself went to 
 work in the salt mines, beginning work as early 
 as four o clock in the morning. 
 
 The boy had always been determined to learn 
 to read, and when his mother somehow got him 
 an old blue-backed speller, he learned the alpha 
 bet without a teacher. He was only eight or nine 
 years old when he persuaded some one to teach 
 
20 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 him a little at night, when the long day s work in 
 the mines was over. Sometime later, a school for 
 Negroes was opened, and for a little while 
 Booker was allowed to attend it by getting up 
 extra early for work in the mine before school and 
 by working again when school was out. The first 
 day he went to school, the teacher asked all the 
 children their names. Booker noticed that the 
 others had two or three names. When his turn 
 came, he made up a last name for himself, saying, 
 "Booker Washington." Afterward he found 
 that when he was a tiny baby he had been called 
 Booker Taliaferro, so he took Taliaferro for his 
 middle name. 
 
 As the years went on, the boy worked in a coal 
 mine and later as a house-servant, but always 
 with the thirst for an education in his heart. At 
 last he heard of Hampton, where boys might 
 earn enough to pay for their education by work 
 ing part of the time on the farm and in the shops. 
 He went to Hampton, walking most of the dis 
 tance, sleeping out of doors, working along the 
 way for money to buy food, but hungry much 
 of the time. He reached Hampton tired out and 
 so dirty and shabby, having had no chance for so 
 long a time to wash or change his clothes, that he 
 looked like a tramp. The teacher who first saw 
 him did not like to admit him. Finally, however, 
 she told him to go and sweep one of the rooms. 
 He wanted to study books, not sweep floors; but 
 
A Story of Service 21 
 
 instead of crying or getting angry, he saw his 
 chance and took advantage of it. This spirit ex 
 plains much of the secret of his wonderful life. 
 So instead of a book, Booker took a hroom and, 
 without knowing it, showed the teacher the kind 
 of boy he was. He swept that room three times, 
 closets, corners, and all. Then he dusted it 
 four times, furniture and woodwork too. When 
 he called her, how that teacher hunted for 
 dirt! When she couldn t see any, she took out 
 her pocket-handkerchief and rubbed suspicious 
 places, but not a speck could she get on it. 
 i Well, boy," said she, "I guess you will do." 
 
 There followed many years of hard work and 
 privations, but when Booker Washington grad 
 uated, he carried away the trust and friendship 
 of every one at Hampton, white and black. He 
 had in his heart a passion for truth, for knowl 
 edge, and for service. His power was won by do 
 ing every least thing within his reach, however 
 hard or disagreeable, as perfectly as he could and 
 as cheerfully as if it were the deepest desire of 
 his heart. 
 
 After graduation, Booker taught school, deny 
 ing himself severely that he might help his 
 brother John and an adopted brother also 
 through Hampton. He was then called back to 
 the Institute and given charge of the dormitory 
 for Indian boys. His power to understand, con 
 trol, and inspire these boys of a race so widely 
 
22 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 different from his own showed once more his> 
 unusual quality. 
 
 Then came the call to his life-work. Some 
 white citizens of Tuskegee, Alabama, wrote to 
 General Armstrong, Hampton s founder, asking 
 him to send them a teacher to take charge of a 
 school to be opened there for Negroes. General 
 Armstrong sent Booker Washington. It was the 
 American Missionary Association that, backing 
 General Armstrong, made Hampton possible, 
 and it was Hampton that had made possible 
 Booker Washington as America and the world 
 came to know him and through him, Tuskegee. 
 Thus Hampton and Tuskegee, two of the great 
 est forces in the world for Negro betterment, 
 both owe their existence to the Christian Church. 
 
 Arrived at Tuskegee, Mr. Washington found 
 no school building and only a small sum to pro 
 vide one, pay the teacher s salary, and meet 
 other expenses. A dilapidated church and a 
 near-by shanty were secured, neither of them 
 weather-proof. When it rained, the teacher had 
 to stand under an umbrella. But here, with 
 thirty pupils and one teacher, there began on 
 July 4th, 1881, a school which has become one of 
 the famous institutions of the world. 
 
 Soon after, an abandoned plantation, the "big 
 house" of which had burned down, was offered 
 for sale for five hundred dollars. To the man 
 .who afterward raised millions, this seemed an 
 
A Story of Service 23 
 
 almost staggering sum, but he was able to borrow 
 the money, penniless as he was a fact which 
 shows not only his own courage, but the kind of 
 faith he inspired in white people. The four old 
 buildings on the farm a cabin, a kitchen, a stable, 
 and a hen-house were cleaned and repaired after 
 school hours, teacher and students working to 
 gether. Soon these new class-rooms were ready 
 for use, and Mr. Washington sent to Hampton for 
 an assistant teacher. Together they got up sup 
 pers and festivals to pay for the new place. White 
 and colored people helped raise the money, though 
 both races were poor. Often the Negroes could 
 give only a nickel or a dime. One old colored 
 woman, too poor even for this, brought six eggs 
 "to put into de eddication ob dese boys an girls. 7 
 Most Negroes at this time thought of an educa 
 tion as some magic good that would help them to 
 live without working. But Mr. Washington had 
 learned at Hampton that every one who earns the 
 right to live must work in some way, and that the 
 great majority of people of every race must work 
 with their hands. He wanted to teach his people 
 to honor work and to put brains and character 
 into it. He believed in everybody, white and 
 black, having all the education possible; but he 
 knew that the first thing for his people, poor and 
 ignorant as they were, was to learn to work in 
 telligently and happily at whatever they could get 
 to do, such as farming and the simpler industries. 
 
24 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 He knew they could learn a kind of farming that 
 would bring them money enough to build com 
 fortable homes instead of such cabins as the one 
 in which he had been born. He wanted them to 
 learn how to be clean and healthy, to have plenty 
 of fruit, vegetables, chickens, eggs, and milk for 
 their children, instead of their everlasting diet of 
 fat pork and cornbread. He undertook to revolu 
 tionize the habits of a people, their thoughts, and 
 their standards. And he did it. And in so doing, 
 he, more than any other one man, taught the world 
 the kind of education that the masses of every 
 race need. All over the world "the Hampton 
 idea" is being adopted by governments, mission 
 boards, and experts in education for those masses 
 of people whose development has been retarded. 
 It is the Hampton idea General Armstrong s 
 idea which he worked out at Hampton; but 
 Booker Washington, even more than its great 
 originator, made it famous. 
 
 At first the Negroes did not like this idea of 
 work. They came to school in order that they 
 might not have to work. When the land of the 
 new farm was to be cleared and planted, the stu 
 dents balked. But when their teacher took an ax 
 and went to the woods, inviting them to come with 
 him, they went. If he would chop trees and plow 
 and hoe, they were willing to do it also. They 
 were very proud of a teacher who was a real grad- 
 
A Story of Service 25 
 
 uate, and if he was willing to work like that, pos 
 sibly it was not so bad, after all. 
 
 The white people, watching, were well pleased, 
 more and more so as they saw the Negro hovels 
 changing into thrifty homes, and intelligent farm 
 ing bringing larger crops for themselves as well 
 as for the Negroes. The white stores began to 
 prosper, also. The Negroes were putting money 
 in the bank and buying land. But they were buy 
 ing building material, too, and better clothes and 
 comforts and conveniences such as they had never 
 had. They did better work for the white people 
 and were to be trusted more. The white people 
 saw that Negro prosperity was good for every 
 body, and they began to believe in that kind of 
 education for all races. They saw that honest 
 work means the building of character, and that 
 intelligent work means mental growth and inde 
 pendence and happy homes. These things are 
 good for everybody. The Negro needs them not 
 because he is a Negro, but because he is a human 
 being. 
 
 The whole wonderful story of Tuskegee cannot 
 be told here. It can be found in a book which 
 should be read by every American, black and 
 white; a book to interest young people and old 
 people and to make even a coward brave Up 
 from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. The 
 North Carolina State Board of Education has in- 
 
26 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 c mded it in its list of books for high school li 
 braries of both races. It will broaden the mind 
 and cheer the heart of any who will read it. 
 
 Mr. Washington began to speak in public to his 
 own people first, then to white people of the North, 
 where he went to raise money, then to Southern 
 white people. If the test of oratory is the speak 
 er s power to make people who do not sympathize 
 with him or believe as he does feel sympathy, >see 
 as he sees, accept his doctrine, and believe in him r 
 then Booker Washington was one of the greatest 
 orators America has produced. In New Orleans 
 he spoke before a great audience of Southern 
 white people most of whom, in those early days 
 before Mr. Washington was known, were hostile 
 to any Negro set forward as a leader. In five 
 minutes he had gripped their interest, and soon 
 he held them in the hollow of his hand. They 
 laughed and cried as he moved them men and 
 women, thousands of them ; they rocked the walls 
 with their applause ; they flocked about him after 
 ward, eager to grasp his hand. Over and over he 
 aroused the same enthusiasm. Presidents, gov 
 ernors, bishops, heads of great universities pub 
 licly honored him. At Charleston, five miles from 
 the old salt mines, the governor of West Virginia 
 and his staff gave him a public reception to which 
 footh races flocked. In Atlanta he swept the 
 crowds off their feet, including the governor of 
 Georgia who >sat beside him on the stage. It was 
 
A Story of Service 27 
 
 ; the same way in staid Boston and in England, 
 where the greatest came to hear him. But it was 
 not just emotion that he stirred. He made people 
 see and love the real things, the big, simple, 
 Christ-like things that never change. He made 
 right look wise and beautiful, as it is, and he 
 showed two different races the way to live side 
 by side in justice and friendship, "in things purely 
 social as separate as the fingers, yet one as the 
 hand in all things essential to mutual progress." 
 Booker Washington did the work of a dozen 
 men. He stimulated Negro business throughout 
 the country by his organization of the Negro Busi 
 ness League and his inspiration and direction of 
 it. His health work has influenced the whole 
 South and has won cooperation, not only from 
 local white organizations, but from state officers, 
 boards of health, federations of women s clubs, 
 chambers of commerce, and the like. He never 
 spared himself, and, as men see things, he died 
 before his time. Broken down in body, Mr. Wash 
 ington was taken to St. Luke s Hospital in New 
 York. When he found the end was near, he asked 
 to be taken home to die. They put him in a special 
 car with doctors and nurses and his devoted wife. 
 The country watched that journey, and the great 
 newspapers told everywhere how he was standing 
 the trip this man born a slave on the earthen 
 floor of a windowless cabin. He reached Tuskegee 
 just alive, and there, in his own beautiful home, 
 
28 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 amid hearts that loved him and the folk he had 
 lifted up, Booker Washington passed out to meet 
 Ms Master and to get his praise from Grod. 
 
 What made him great? He had a strong, broad 
 mind, but not a preeminent one. Some of his own 
 race, many of ours, were his mental equals or su 
 periors, yet they were not in the same class with 
 him at all. He was a highly gifted administrator, 
 a remarkable speaker, but so are many lesser per 
 sons. Where was the secret of his power? I puz 
 zled over it until I heard him talk to his own 
 people one day, and then I knew. 
 
 Speaking to white people, he appealed to their 
 common sense, their love of justice, their spirit of 
 sympathy and fair play, their business interests. 
 To his own people that day, he spoke of Jesus 
 Christ and of how He would help them meet diffi 
 cult conditions in the right way. He spoke of 
 injustices the Negro often suffers and of the dan 
 ger of bitterness and hatred against a people be 
 cause of the wrongdoing of some. "I have felt 
 these things, he said. i I suffered much. I grew 
 to hate white men as some of you do to-day. I 
 hated them until my soul began to dry up. My 
 power to love and help my own people was shrivel 
 ing. I found that hate in my heart to any man 
 would kill my usefulness to all men. Then I car 
 ried my hate to Jesus Christ, and He delivered 
 me from it. He took it out of my heart. He keeps 
 me free. He showed me how to love white men, 
 
A Story of Service 29 
 
 and now I can serve them and my own people to 
 gether and alike. " 
 
 Biding down Fifth Avenue in New York some 
 months after Dr. Washington s death, a crowd of 
 people was seen blocking the sidewalk out to the 
 roadway, yet none of the policemen in sight made 
 the people move on. Coming nearer, it was no 
 ticed that those who left the crowd and came up 
 the avenue had a different look on their faces 
 not the alert Fifth Avenue look, keen for new 
 fashions and costly trifles, but one that seemed to 
 go beyond the great buildings and splendid shops. 
 Coming opposite the window of a great silver 
 smith, one saw that the crowd was gazing at a 
 bronze bust. The face was furrowed and tired 
 and black the face of this same Negro and one 
 time slave. Yet there stood before it rich and 
 poor, glimpsing, no doubt, something of the beauty 
 of a life of unselfish service and its splendid eter 
 nal unshakableness ; and one Southern woman 
 thanked God that death makes so plain the things 
 really worth living and dying for, and looked at 
 the black face through a mist of tears. 
 
 But what of Tuskegee when the heart and brain 
 from which it grew were gone? The spirit of 
 service which had filled its founder s life was 
 still there, a flame kindled in hundreds of hearts, 
 and God, who carries on His work even when He 
 
30 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 calls His workmen home, had -a man ready for the 
 task now grown so great. 
 
 This man, too, is from Virginia, born soon 
 after the Civil War. One unusual thing about him 
 is that he knows all about his ancestors for gen 
 erations back. Not very many white people, and 
 few Negroes, know as much about their great- 
 great-great-grandfather as does this black man. 
 
 When this grandfather was young, in 1735, his 
 father, an African chief, fought a battle in which 
 he took many captives. Some of them he sent in 
 chains down to the sea-coast, to be sold as slaves. 
 His son had charge of the convoy. The young 
 man sold his slaves and then accepted the invita 
 tion of the traders to go on board their wonderful 
 ship and inspect it. Afterwards he took dinner 
 with them. His food must have been drugged, for 
 when he came to himself, he was far out at sea, 
 chained in the hold with the very slaves he had 
 himself so recently sold. 
 
 This young man, the son of an African chief, 
 was brought to Eichmond, Virginia, and sold. He 
 lived to a very great age, trusted and kindly 
 treated by his master. He told the story of his 
 capture to his great-granddaughter, who, in turn, 
 told it to her grandson, Dr. Kobert Moton, now 
 president of Tuskegee Institute. 
 
 Dr. Moton s father s mother also came from 
 Africa, and all his people afterwards, on both 
 sides, were slaves. He himself was born free and 
 
A Story of Service 31 
 
 { 
 
 grew up happily on the plantation where his 
 ^father was foreman and his mother the cook for 
 ^ the big house." 
 
 His mother had learned to read, and she taught 
 |her little son at night by the light of a pineknot 
 ifire. When at length the white folks in the big 
 (house found this out, one of the young ladies 
 taught Eobert herself. Afterwards, he went to 
 Sthe country school when it was open, working the 
 ; rest of the time, first as house-boy and then in the 
 fields. For years he attended the colored Sunday- 
 school, which was taught by the best white people 
 jof the neighborhood, among whom he had many 
 | friends. 
 
 But for his mother, Eobert Moton might have 
 fmissed the great opportunity which came to him 
 fat Booker Washington s death. When he was only 
 1 eighteen, he was superintendent of the Baptist 
 8 Sunday-school, leader of the church choir, and a 
 potable speaker at religious and political gather- 
 fiings of his people. This was in "reconstruction" 
 [times, and some white and colored politicians 
 Swanted him to go to the legislature. It was 
 I against the law for a minor to fill such an office, 
 -but he was six feet tall and could pass for twenty- 
 lone. The politicians said that the only thing nec- 
 essary was for his mother to swear that he was of 
 age. It was a dazzling offer to a poor colored 
 boy, and he was finally talked into a half-hearted 
 consent. But he reckoned without his mother. 
 
32 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 Not even for her beloved and only child would she 
 swear to a lie, and instead of going to the legis 
 lature, Robert went to Hampton the beginning, 
 little as he dreamed it, of a far more distinguished 
 career. 
 
 The next years were filled with hard study and 
 harder work in the school lumber mill and at all 
 sorts of jobs in summer. One whole year he took 
 off, teaching a country school. On graduation, 
 young Moton made so fine a record that he was 
 offered the position of assistant to the comman 
 dant, the white officer in charge of the students 
 discipline. When the commandant resigned, 
 Major Moton, as he was then called, took his place. 
 There were many Indians in the school, a 
 sprinkling of Chinese, Japanese, African Negroes, 
 Armenians, and Hawaiians. The faculty was 
 made up of Northern and Southern white people, 
 with Major Moton the only Negro on it. To main 
 tain both discipline and good- will among those stu 
 dents of many races and to grow in the confidence 
 and esteem of the white faculty was no small ac 
 complishment. But for twenty-seven years it was 
 done. 
 
 North and South, Major Moton made friends for 
 the school, speaking before audiences of white and 
 of black people. In Virginia he drew into the 
 Negro Organization Society all the scattered col 
 ored societies educational, economic, secret, and 
 open to work together for "better schools, bet- 
 
A Story of Service 33 
 
 ter health, better homes, better farms." They be 
 gan with clean-ups and health work, securing 
 hearty cooperation from the state and from local 
 organizations of white people. They bought a 
 farm on which the state put up a sanitarium for 
 Negro consumptives. Many leading men and 
 women of both races have been brought into con 
 tact with one another through the work of the 
 Society, and interracial good-will has been pro 
 moted to a noteworthy extent. 
 
 When Dr. Washington died, in 1915, Major 
 Moton was elected president of Tuskegee Insti 
 tute. He was perhaps the one man who could take 
 the position without being dwarfed by his great 
 predecessor. The influence of the school goes on 
 as before, broadening and deepening with the 
 years. 
 
 During the war, Dr. Moton was frequently called 
 to Washington by the Government for consulta 
 tion about matters concerning the Negroes within 
 and without the army. Tuskegee did fine work in 
 training colored officers and technical experts, and 
 the school s great service flag is a wonderful rec 
 ord of loyal Americanism. In stimulating produc 
 tion among colored workers, in the thrift, Liberty 
 Loan, and Red Cross campaigns, and in all other 
 war work, Dr. Moton was a force felt, not only 
 throughout the state of Alabama, but among his 
 people throughout the country. In this work he 
 was brought into contact as never before with the 
 
34: In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 leading white men of the South, whose confidence 
 and respect he won. He is, therefore, a great force 
 for interracial understanding and friendship. 
 When colored men were added to the Interracial 
 Commission, composed of leading white people 
 from every Southern state, Dr. Moton was 
 the first Negro chosen to represent his race in 
 that body. 
 
 In 1918 President Wilscn and the Secretary of 
 War sent Dr. Moton to France to look into and 
 report upon conditions affecting the Negro sol 
 diers and to suggest whatever changes he thought 
 would add to their usefulness and well-being. 
 This mission called for tact and insight of a high 
 order and was of great benefit to both races, clear 
 ing up misunderstandings, removing friction, and 
 promoting justice and good- will. 
 
 His work still broadens out. "Speaking the 
 truth in love" to both races, never dodging an 
 issue, but meeting men of both races in the spirit 
 of Christ, Dr. Moton is one of the constructive 
 forces in America to-day. 
 
Ill 
 
 A DOCTOR OF MEDICINE 
 
 TWENTY years or so before the Civil War, 
 a Maryland slave ran away from Ms master 
 and went to Canada by the "underground 
 railway." That was the name for the chain of 
 homes and stopping-places where Negroes fleeing 
 from slavery were hidden and cared for by those 
 who sympathized with them. If slaves were dis 
 covered before they got out of the United States, 
 the law required sheriffs and policemen, even in 
 the free states, to arrest them and return them 
 to their masters; but if they once got across the 
 line into Canada, they could not be brought back. 
 Quakers and others who thought, even then, that 
 slavery was wrong arranged stopping-places from 
 many points along the borders of the slave states 
 and all the way up to Canada, and many colored 
 people made their way along these routes to free 
 dom. So this Maryland slave, named Roman, 
 when once he had found friends, was passed on 
 from hiding-place to hiding-place until at last he 
 reached Ontario, in Canada, and there he lived 
 and worked for over twenty years. He married 
 the daughter of a Negro farmer who had, himself, 
 run away from Virginia long years before. 
 
 35 
 
36 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 When Lincoln s proclamation freeing the slaves 
 made it safe to return to the United States, Eoman 
 took his family to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, 
 and there, on the 4th of July, 1864, his son Charles 
 was born. 
 
 There was a large family, and they knew what 
 it was to be poor and without many of the com 
 forts of life. Sometimes, however, people who do 
 without comfort get something bigger and better 
 in its place; they learn to be brave and cheerful 
 no matter what their surroundings are. This little 
 colored boy was one of these fortunate people. 
 The hard lessons he mastered helped him during 
 the struggle of his early years. Now that he has 
 won comfort and independence for himself and 
 his family, these lessons still help him by giving 
 him a quick sympathy for those who struggle. 
 Much of his happiness comes from giving to others 
 the help he himself used to need so much. 
 
 Charles was a chap who liked to discover things 
 for himself. A little brook ran near his home, and 
 he wanted to find out where it came from. He 
 was a tiny child, only three or four years old, but 
 he set out to find the beginning of that brook, i 
 He walked a great distance, resting by the way, j 
 no doubt, but he was gone so long that his mother 
 roused the neighborhood to help her find him. ; 
 They searched the fields and the woods, and at last 
 they found the boy at the place where the brook 
 began a little pool with a bubbling spring at the 
 
A Doctor of Medicine 37 
 
 bottom of it. He was watching it as hard as he 
 could, more puzzled than ever as to where the 
 water came from and still determined to find out. 
 But his mother carried him off home, and if he 
 had intended trying to get down the hole at the 
 bottom of the pool, his plans were nipped in the 
 bud. 
 
 When he was six years old, Charles s father, a 
 broom-maker by trade, went back to Canada, and 
 until he was twelve, the boy spent much of his time 
 on his grandfather s farm. He had all sorts of 
 adventures here, trying to ride the steers like the 
 big boys and being tossed over the fence, walking 
 a mile to the pasture gate to open it for his grand 
 father, that he might ride back with him as a 
 reward, climbing the fruit trees to eat all one boy 
 could possibly hold, trotting after the sheep, and 
 often getting into mischief which tried his grand 
 mother s patience more than he found comfort 
 able. His grandfather was his refuge at such 
 times and usually arranged a peace for him. The 
 old man liked the boy s fearlessness, his honesty, 
 his eagerness to find out things, his readiness to 
 take a hand in whatever came along. Like most 
 men, he did not take the messes the child made or 
 his mischief as seriously as his wife, who had to 
 set things in order. 
 
 But play-days were soon over. When Charles 
 was twelve years old, his parents moved to Dun- 
 das, and the boy went to work in a cotton mill. 
 
38 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 The machinery started at six o clock, and any one 
 who was not at the mill ten minutes beforehand 
 had to go to the office for discipline. This was 
 such an unpleasant experience that most of the 
 boys arrived far ahead of time. Charlie Eoman 
 put himself on the safe side by being on hand 
 every morning at half -past five. 
 
 With work lasting for ten and a half hours, 
 there was little time left for other things. But 
 the boy s heart was so set on having an educa 
 tion, there were so many things he wanted to 
 find out, that he spent two hours every evening 
 at night-school, studying afterwards at home until 
 far into the night. He read every book he could 
 lay his hands on, borrowing them wherever he 
 could. On Sundays he went regularly to Sunday- 
 school and studied his Bible as far as his oppor 
 tunities made possible. Charlie belonged to a lit 
 tle band of teetotalers, who were much less num 
 erous then in Canada, or anywhere else, than they 
 afterward became. And behind everything he did, 
 this boy had one settled purpose in life. 
 
 One day at the noon hour the boys at the mill 
 were telling each other what they meant to be 
 when they grew up. Charles, the one colored boy 
 in the group, and a white boy named Arthur were 
 the only two who had nothing to say. The col 
 ored boy, kindly treated by many of his mill asso 
 ciates, was made by others to feel very sharply 
 that they looked down upon him, not because of 
 
A Doctor of Medicine 39 
 
 what he was, but because of the color of his skin ; 
 so when the others talked, he often listened and 
 said nothing. Arthur said nothing because he was 
 a shy boy with different thoughts from most of 
 the others. After a while, one of the bigger boys 
 turned to him in a bullying, sneering way and 
 asked, "Well, Arthur, what are you going to be?" 
 
 "I m going to be a musician, " replied the boy, 
 quietly. 
 
 A howl of derision went up at this. They 
 looked at him, poorly clad, without money or 
 friends, tied to a factory ten hours a day for 
 barely enough to keep him alive, and they 
 laughed until they nearly lost their breath. 
 
 When the delightful edge of the joke was dulled 
 a little, the big boy, in an effort to repeat his suc 
 cess with Arthur, turned to the silent colored boy, 
 sneering more than ever. "And what are you go 
 ing to be, if you please?" he inquired. 
 
 "A doctor of medicine," came the answer, quick 
 as a flash. 
 
 How they roared at that I They laughed until 
 they almost cried, and went back to work at last 
 still chuckling and thinking the big boy who had 
 asked the questions a very master of humor. 
 
 But both those boys told the truth. The white 
 boy has gone home already, carrying back to God 
 the gift which had been given him and which he 
 did his best to develop and use. When he died, 
 he was the leader of an orchestra. And the col- 
 
40 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 ored boy but you shall hear what the colored boy 
 did. 
 
 He worked in the mill for five years until he 
 was seventeen years old. All this time he studied 
 and read at night, and all this time his thirst for 
 knowledge grew. Then came an accident at the 
 mill which sent him to the hospital badly hurt. 
 He was there a long time. One operation after 
 another was performed, and for months the boy 
 fought for his life through suffering and almost 
 despair. When at last he came out of the hospital, 
 he was on crutches, lame for life. To such a big, 
 strong, active young fellow, this must have been a 
 great trial. It was well that he had developed a 
 strong Christian faith, for he needed all the com 
 fort it could give him. 
 
 But often, through the very troubles which seem 
 to block our way, God opens a door through which 
 we pass to something even better than our dreams. 
 Now that Charles was hopelessly disqualified as a 
 mill worker, it was decided that he must have a 
 chance at the brain work he so wanted. On 
 crutches, therefore, he went to the Collegiate In 
 stitute in Hamilton. Here he worked as hard as 
 though lameness did not exist, finishing the six 
 years course in three. Before school and after, 
 Charles found time to help pay his way through 
 school. He sold i notions wherever he could find 
 a buyer and did all the odd jobs possible to one 
 in his condition. Despite his drawbacks, the young 
 
r A Doctor of Medicine 41 
 
 man kept such brave good cheer that he made 
 friends for himself everywhere he went, among 
 both white and black people. Whatever could help 
 him, his friends put in his way, and above all, the 
 mother whom he so devotedly loved stood by him 
 as brave and cheerful as he himself, helping him 
 in every possible manner. His teachers were es 
 pecially kind to him, not because he was black, but 
 because he was an eager student and learned so 
 quickly and even brilliantly. 
 
 "I have taught hundreds of boys," said one, 
 years afterward, "but among them all this boy 
 had the brightest mind I ever touched." 
 
 After graduation Charles went South, feeling 
 that there he could best serve his people. He 
 taught school in Kentucky, then in Tennessee, and 
 at length in Nashville, the capital. 
 
 Meharry College, the best medical school for Ne 
 groes in the South, is in Nashville. The school 
 has been, and is, a blessing to both races all over 
 the South, for with Negroes in every white home 
 and business house, sickness for either race means 
 sickness for both. Meharry raised health-stand 
 ards for Negroes first in Nashville, then in every 
 state to which its graduates have gone. Young 
 Eoman was anxious to enter the college at once, 
 but could not for lack of money. However, while 
 teaching in the public schools, he began to study 
 the books in the medical course. As soon as he 
 had saved enough money, he entered Meharry as 
 
42 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 a regular student. He worked during vacations in 
 a colored physician s office and finished his course 
 with honor. 
 
 After practising briefly in Tennessee, Dr. 
 Eoman went to Dallas, Texas, where he built up 
 a successful practice. He was still a student by 
 nature, and from time to time took post-graduate 
 courses in Chicago and Philadelphia. Then he 
 went to London and Paris, specializing in diseases 
 of the eye, ear, nose, and throat. On his return 
 from Europe, he was offered a professorship at 
 Meharry along the lines of his special prepara 
 tion. He has been there ever since, except during 
 the World War when the Government appointed 
 him special lecturer to the colored troops, on so 
 cial hygiene. He traveled all over the country in 
 the war-years, reaching many thousands of young 
 men of his own race with sound teaching and pow 
 erful appeal founded both on his knowledge of 
 medicine and his living faith in Jesus Christ. 
 
 While teaching at Meharry and attending to his 
 large and growing practice in the city, he still 
 found time to study, not alone to keep up in his 
 profession, but to broaden his life in other fields. 
 He had been offered the degree of M.A. from sev 
 eral colored colleges of excellent standing as an 
 honorable recognition both of his scholarship and 
 of his services as a citizen, but he would have 
 nothing he had not earned. Professor though he 
 was, he studied at Fisk University, winning his 
 
A Doctor of Medicine 43 
 
 M.A. in 1913. He was nearly fifty years old at 
 this time, but he never expects to be too old to 
 learn. He is now director of physiology and hy 
 giene at Fisk as well as a professor at Meharry. 
 
 Dr. Eoman is an active worker in the A. M. E. 
 Church, of which he is a member. Into his Bible 
 class of two hundred young men and women, he 
 puts his whole heart. Sunday after Sunday and 
 year after year as the students crowd his class, 
 the hold he has upon them is evident. 
 
 It is the same with his medical classes. Because 
 of a real love for teaching and for his students, he 
 quickens both their minds and their hearts. They 
 love him and trust him, and he has helped so many 
 in difficulty and trouble, both outward and inward, 
 that he cannot remember the half of it himself. 
 He has never forgotten his own struggles with 
 poverty, with misunderstanding, with pain, and 
 with discouragement, and he knows how to help 
 and comfort others who are themselves strug 
 gling in like manner. 
 
 For years Dr. Eoman has been known to South 
 ern white people as a man of unusual character 
 and gifts. He has stood for full justice to his own 
 people, but he has always taught and lived his be 
 lief that full respect is possible between the races 
 without intermingling and without antagonism. 
 This was the burden of his message to the white 
 people at the annual meeting of the Southern 
 Sociological Congress in Atlanta a few years ago. 
 
44: In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 This address, published afterward in "The Hu 
 man Way," a pamphlet issued by the Congress, 
 is, like all of Dr. Boman s addresses, full of epi 
 grammatic thought. For example : 
 
 "Misunderstanding, rather than meanness, 
 makes men unjust to each other." 
 
 "Ignorance and prejudice feed upon each 
 other." 
 
 "As a man thinks, not as he looks, finally fixes 
 Ms status." 
 
 "Thoughts, not bites, win the battles of life." 
 
 "Man s attitude toward new or unpleasant 
 truth is the greatest tragedy of human life." 
 
 "No man is secure in his rights so long as any 
 man is deprived of his." 
 
 "Let us accept it as a fact, that the Negro and 
 the white man must survive or perish together in 
 the South, and that there can be no mutual fair 
 play without mutual respect." 
 
 To bring this respect about, Dr. Eoman pleaded 
 for fairer dealing in the newspapers. They re 
 port crimes committed by Negroes as if they were 
 especially Negro crimes, not as a crime committed 
 by a criminal, as white crimes are reported. No 
 one thinks of blaming a whole race for one bad 
 white man s deeds, but a Negro s crime is re 
 ported as something different something any 
 member of that race might be expected to do. 
 
 He asked three other things which would do 
 much in promoting fair play and mutual respect : 
 
A Doctor of Medicine 45 
 
 The first was to clear white speech of such con 
 temptuous terms as "nigger," "coon," and the 
 like. Courtesy, one might say, never belittles 
 either its user or its recipient. The second was 
 never to report the speeches of race agitators who 
 try, especially on certain political levels, to stir 
 prejudice for personal gain. The third was to 
 publish the creditable things the Negroes do and 
 to try to learn more about those members of the 
 race whose lives and achievements are worthy of 
 respect. 
 
 These are sensible suggestions. Hundreds of 
 Southern white people are now at work trying to 
 get them and others like them adopted through 
 out the South. In every Southern state and in 
 over eight hundred counties in the South there 
 have been formed in the last three or four years 
 interracial committees composed of leading white 
 iand leading colored men and women. Sometimes 
 they all belong to the same committee, sometimes 
 there is a white committee and a colored one. In 
 the latter case, the two committees meet frequently 
 together. All over the South the best members of 
 both races are coming to -know one another. Dr. 
 Roman is an influential member of the Tennessee 
 state committee, and the white men who serve with 
 him believe in him. One of these men, Dr. Kirk- 
 land, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, said 
 of him that he had the respect and esteem of the 
 thoughtful men of both races, and that his life 
 
6 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 and work had done much for the uplift of his race. 
 
 Dr. Roman s own people have honored him in 
 many ways. Layman though he is, his Church 
 sent him as fraternal messenger to the Canadian 
 Methodist Church and also as a delegate to the 
 Ecumenical Methodist Conference which met in 
 Toronto in 1911. His fraternal address was 
 widely commented on in the Canadian papers as 
 of remarkable eloquence without regard to the 
 speaker s race. He has served as president of 
 the National Negro Medical Association and has 
 done much to raise the standards of health and 
 sanitation among his people. Dr. Eoman is much 
 sought after as a speaker at Negro colleges. North 
 and South. His addresses make, not only for 
 better living and higher standards within his own 
 race, but also for helpful relations of the two 
 races one with another. He has written much 
 for the best class of Negro publications. A book 
 written by him on American civilization and the 
 Negro has won high praise. 
 
 Dr. Eoman does not propose to grow old if he 
 lives to be a hundred. He thinks hard work, hard 
 study, and helping others, if wisely mixed and 
 regularly taken, is a better elixir of youth than 
 Ponce de Leon s fabled fountain. He is still in 
 full vigor, still studying, still growing, still broad 
 ening his service to his fellow man. 
 
SAVING AN IDEA 
 
 SOME people seem born to get those things 
 done which nobody else would even attempt. 
 Some driving force within sends them out 
 on a new, untried, hard way, on what seems to all 
 their friends to be a wild-goose chase. To them, 
 however, it is a veritable quest of the Holy Grail. 
 They go from one difficulty to another, with no 
 better sense, the onlookers think, than to tackle 
 the impossible; and then, all at once, when the 
 wild project is thought to be dead and as good as 
 buried, the thing, in some amazing way, is done 
 r a success beyond dispute. Then people begin to 
 praise it and the doer of it, and forget that they 
 said it couldn t be done. That is what happened 
 to Nannie Burroughs and her big idea. She says 
 the Lord worked it out, and that it couldn t pos 
 sibly have been done without prayer and faith. 
 
 Nannie was born in Orange, Virginia. Her 
 mother s people and her father s belonged to that 
 small and fortunate class of ex-slaves whose en 
 ergy and ability enabled them to start towards 
 prosperity almost as soon as the war which freed 
 them was over. When she was still a very little 
 girl, one of her grandfathers owned a good farm, 
 
 47 
 
48 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 and the other made a comfortable living as a 
 skilled carpenter. Her mother, left with her 
 little girl to provide for, could have been sup 
 ported by either of these men, but she was un 
 willing to be dependent on relatives ; and besides, 
 she wanted her child to have a better education 
 than the country town could afford. When Nannie 
 was five years old, her mother went to Washing 
 ton. Here she worked and kept her child in school 
 until Nannie graduated with honor from high 
 school. 
 
 The young girl took a thorough business course, 
 and special work in domestic science. She 
 wanted to teach the latter branches, and as she 
 had led her class in all her work, she was given 
 to understand that if she would take this special 
 preparation, she would be made assistant teacher 
 of domestic science in the high school. The posi 
 tion was given, however, to some one else, who, it 
 was rumored, had "pull" with the authorities. 
 
 "I can t tell you how it broke me up," she said. 
 "I had my life all planned out to settle down in 
 Washington with my mother, do that easy, pleas 
 ant work, draw a good salary, and be comfortable 
 the rest of my life, with no responsibilities to 
 weigh me down. I never would have done the 
 thing I have done ; I would not even have thought 
 of it. 
 
 "But somehow, an idea was struck out of the 
 suffering of that disappointment that I would 
 

 Miss NAXME II. BURROUGHS 
 
Saving an Idea 49 
 
 some day have a school here in Washington that 
 politics had nothing to do with, and that would 
 give all sorts of girls a fair chance and help them 
 overcome whatever handicaps they might have. 
 It came to me like a flash of light, and I knew I 
 was to do that thing when the time came. But I 
 couldn t do it yet, so I just put the idea away in 
 the back of my head and left it there. J 
 
 She went to Philadelphia and worked in an 
 office for a year. Then she went to Louisville, 
 Kentucky, where, at the headquarters of the Na 
 tional Baptist Convention of the Colored Church, 
 she became bookkeeper and editorial secretary. 
 Like her mother, she had been a devoted church 
 member from childhood, and she put her energy, 
 her training, and her great gifts into the service 
 of her church. 
 
 But even the heavy official work for both the 
 men s and the women s conventions could not con 
 sume the energy of this human dynamo. 
 
 Because she had had such good opportunities at 
 school and knew so much about right ways of liv 
 ing, Miss Burroughs folt a responsibility toward 
 helping those who had had no chance to learn. 
 She was teaching in Sunday-school and was being 
 asked to talk at all kinds of church meetings. 
 "But what s the sense of talk," she said, "if you 
 don t do something? You talk, and people get 
 stirred up and think they d like to do something, 
 and that makes them feel good, and they go off 
 
50 In the Vanguard of a Mace 
 
 happy and satisfied, feeling as though they re 
 some account in the world because they ve felt like 
 doing something and they haven t done one thing 
 to help one soul alive. If you re going to be a 
 Christian, you ve got to do something week-days 
 as well as talk and feel about it Sundays." 
 
 So she organized a Woman s Industrial 
 Club. They rented a house and served cheap, 
 wholesome lunches for colored working-folk. 
 In the evenings she taught domestic science 
 there. She started a class in millinery and a class 
 in what she called, l every-day things needed in the 
 home." This included sanitation, hygiene, suit 
 able dress, care of children, cooking, sewing, and 
 laundry work. The women of the Industrial Club, 
 her helpers and backers, each paid ten cents a 
 week toward the work, and she managed the rest 
 of it herself. She carried on this work during 
 the nine years she lived in Louisville. 
 
 One day one of the leading white women of the 
 city came into her office and asked if she was run 
 ning the cooking-school at the colored women s 
 club. When Miss Burroughs said yes, the woman 
 asked how she got the money for it. 
 
 "Why, we club women pay ten cents a week, 
 and we make pies and cakes and sell them." 
 
 i Well, "said the white woman, * don t give your 
 lessons for nothing any longer. People value more 
 highly that which they pay for. If they can afford 
 only a penny, let them pay that. I will pay you 
 
Saving an Idea 51 
 
 regularly for every pupil you have, so that you 
 can get whatever you need for the school. 
 
 After this, the club grew until Miss Burroughs 
 was forced to put others in charge of the classes, 
 merely supervising the work herself. 
 
 In 1900 she went to the annual meeting of 
 the Colored Baptist Convention and gave a 
 talk which seems to have electrified the 
 assembly. As one result, she was made secretary 
 of the Woman s Auxiliary, a small and feeble mis 
 sionary organization of this great Church which 
 had raised the year before just $15 for the gen 
 eral mission work of the denomination. She has 
 been its secretary ever since. In her first year as 
 secretary, the women raised over $1,000. In 1920 
 they raised over $50,000, and in the twenty years 
 of her leadership they have put $366,000 into the 
 missionary treasury of their Church. 
 
 But while Miss Burroughs worked with enthusi 
 asm and energy for her denomination, she wanted 
 to enlist her churchwomen in something which 
 would draw together and help all the women of 
 her race. 
 
 That idea of a school for girls who needed help 
 had been tucked away for some time in the back 
 of her head ; now she took it out and considered it. 
 
 There were schools for colored girls, of course ; 
 but they were, for the most part, founded and all 
 were largely supported by white people. While 
 Miss Burroughs knew how invaluable this help to 
 
52 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 her race had been, and is, yet she felt that the 
 Negroes were far enough along now to begin to 
 do more for themselves. 
 
 The year after she became secretary of the 
 Woman s Auxiliary, she tried to get her Baptist 
 women together as a starting point for this 
 broader work. 
 
 "We will work harder than ever for the foreign 
 fields of our Church, " she said; "but let us start 
 a national school for girls here at home not a 
 Baptist school, but one that all Negro women, of 
 every creed, can come together on. We don t know 
 what we can do until we all get together." 
 
 But the women would not listen. They would: 
 have none of Miss Burroughs school. They were 
 Baptists, working for the great Baptist Church. 
 Again she put her idea away in the back of her 
 head for safe-keeping and returned to her work 
 in Louisville and to the building up of her Baptist 
 organization in the one direction it was as yet 
 willing to take that of Baptist good works. 
 
 Five years later the Auxiliary was raising 
 $13,000 a year. The women had just put up a 
 brick building for some of their mission work in 
 Africa. Miss Burroughs told them that they 
 needed to help girls here in America as well as 
 in Africa, and that if they had the school she pro 
 posed, they could bring girls here from Africa and 
 prepare them to go back as missionaries. They 
 liked that idea and proposed to rent a little cot- 
 
Saving an Idea 53 
 
 tage somewhere and put some African girls in it 
 to be trained as Baptist missionaries. 
 
 "That s not my idea," said the secretary. "It 
 must be national, not Baptist, something all col 
 ored women can do for all colored girls." 
 
 They appointed a committee. You know, she 
 said, with a flash of the laughter that is always 
 ready to bubble up, "when we women just must 
 dodge an issue, we put it over on a committee. 
 But when the committee met in Louisville, in Jan 
 uary, 1907, they endorsed the plan I suggested." 
 When Miss Burroughs had her vacation that sum 
 mer, she went to Washington to look for a site. 
 With a horse and buggy she drove all over that 
 part of the District, and found a hill site. 
 
 "Somehow I felt the school had to be set on a 
 hill. It was all red gullies up here and a sight 
 to see, with a dilapidated eight-room house atop 
 of it all ; but there were six acres of land and this 
 beautiful view. It was for sale for $6,500, $500 
 to be paid in ten days and $500 more twenty days 
 later; the remainder could wait at interest. I 
 took it." 
 
 "Had the women given you the money?" 
 
 "Why, no, not a cent." 
 
 "Had you saved all that yourself?" 
 
 Again that look of flashing laughter. 
 
 "Why, no; I hadn t saved any money. I d had 
 too many things to do with my money. I had 
 saved an idea." 
 
54 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 4 I see. But what about the $500 ? " 
 
 "I went to Louisville and raised it. From 
 my own people yes. You see" soberly "I d 
 prayed about this thing for a long time. I felt 
 God wanted me to go ahead, and I knew if I did 
 what I could and trusted Him, He would see it 
 through. And He did." 
 
 She stayed on in Louisville for two years until 
 the whole $6,500 was raised and the place 
 paid for. Then she went to Washington and 
 opened her school in October, 1909, with eight 
 pupils. The property is vested in a self-perpetu 
 ating board of trust, the majority of the members 
 being women. If the board is ever dissolved, it 
 goes to the Baptist Convention and the Women s 
 Auxiliary jointly, to be used for educational pur 
 poses. 
 
 Both races bewailed Miss Burroughs leaving 
 Louisville. She was offered a site for her school 
 as a gift if she would stay, but she felt that as a 
 national institution, it should be in the nation s 
 capital. The Louisville Courier- Journal, one of 
 the most distinguished papers of the South, paid 
 her a remarkable tribute: "Probably no woman s 
 organization in Louisville or, for that matter, else 
 where is doing as much practical, far-reaching 
 good" as the organization founded by "this re 
 markable young colored woman, Miss Nannie Bur 
 roughs." 
 
 Of course the school grew. And its young prin- 
 
Saving an Idea 55 
 
 eipal, still secretary of the Women s Auxiliary and 
 having to raise money for her teachers salaries, 
 must provide means for enlargement. She decided 
 to turn an old stable back of the house into class 
 rooms and a dormitory. 
 
 But for once it looked as though she must fail. 
 The women who had wanted the school to be a 
 Baptist training-school did not call it the National 
 Training School, as Miss Burroughs did. Most 
 of them just called it, "Nannie Burroughs 
 school" and washed their hands of it. But one 
 Baptist woman stood by her. When things looked 
 most hopeless, Mrs. Maggie L. Walker, the woman 
 banker of Eichmond, gave her $500 on condition 
 that she would not tell any one who gave it to 
 her. That started the fund, and soon all the 
 money needed was in hand. 
 
 "I had to keep my promise, of course," said 
 iMiss Burroughs, "and not say a word. But you 
 see what I did." 
 
 My eyes followed hers to a substantial, well- 
 painted building which bore above its white col 
 umns the legend, "Maggie L. Walker Hall" a 
 monument to a woman s faith in a woman and in 
 her idea of service. 
 
 The briers and weeds were gone by this time; 
 the girls were cultivating a three-acre garden and 
 canning the surplus yield ; they had filled the gul 
 lies themselves, students and teachers; they had 
 set out trees; and soft green slopes covered the 
 
56 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 once-bare Mil. Concrete walks came next, and 
 then Pioneer Hall, built new from the ground up, 
 three stories and a basement. A white man lent 
 the money for this building, but colored people 
 paid for it. During the war two additional acres 
 were purchased, with a dwelling which was re 
 modeled for sleeping-rooms, industries, and a 
 clubroom. The Northern Baptist white women 
 then offered $3,500 for a model cottage to be used 
 in the domestic science work. Negroes added $500 
 for the building and furnished the cottage taste 
 fully. The senior class in domestic science runs 
 the Home on a practical and profitable basis. 
 Conventions meeting in Washington and all sorts 
 of local organizations, clubs, and groups come out 
 for luncheons and dinners. The girls serve them, 
 and the money goes to the school. 
 
 One day a Washington bank called up Miss Bur 
 roughs and told her they had $1,000 for her. 
 
 "For me?" she gasped. " Where d you get itf 
 Are you sure it s for me!" 
 
 "It s for Nannie H. Burroughs of the National 
 Training School. Come down here and we ll tell 
 you what we know about it." 
 
 She lost no time. The money, she learned, 
 came from the estate of a white Californian 
 who had left a certain sum for work begun 
 and developed by Negroes who showed initia 
 tive and vision. A colored man had told the execu 
 tors about Miss Burroughs school, and after due 
 
Saving an Idea 57 
 
 investigation they had sent her $1,000 for her 
 work. 
 
 "I couldn t put a big gift like that into some 
 thing already started," she said. " There s al 
 ways a place for money our water-works cost us 
 $7,000 up on this hill, and we Ve put in steam heat 
 and electric lights. But this money had to give 
 us something we never would have had without 
 it. I got $3,000 more from my own people and 
 we built the community house down there at the 
 foot of the hill, across the road. Then we put four 
 thousand books into it, upstairs. The public 
 schools and our school and the whole community 
 use those books." 
 
 They showed use when we went to look at them 
 use, not abuse. They are undoubtedly appre 
 ciated. They are in a big room used for commu 
 nity gatherings and entertainments. Downstairs 
 is a store. Formerly there was not a place within 
 a mile where a spool of thread could be bought. 
 Here the neighbors can get notions, staple gro 
 ceries and canned goods, and almost anything that 
 a housekeeper is likely to need in a hurry. The 
 girls of the domestic science department have a 
 cake and pie department that is very popular. 
 
 The community house quickens the mental and 
 spiritual life of the whole neighborhood, ties the 
 school and the community together, gives the girls 
 training both in business and in service to the com 
 munity, and yields the school an annual cash in- 
 
58 In ike Vanguard of a Race 
 
 come of nine per cent on the investment. Doesn t 
 a thousand dollars have to be energized with vi 
 sion, business ability, and human sympathy before 
 it can bring in returns like that! 
 
 With the war came a severe testing of the qual 
 ity of the work the school was doing for the souls 
 of the students. The bitter cold of the war-winter 
 put the school pump quite out of commission this 
 ;was before the $7,000 water-works went in. All 
 winter long and how long that winter lasted! 
 teachers and girls carried in buckets every drop 
 of water used on the place from the neighborhood 
 springs and wells up that steep, icy hill to the tank 
 in the third story of Pioneer Hall: water for 
 cooking, bathing, laundry, dish-washing, cleaning 
 for a hundred and fifty people. "And we all kept 
 clean, and we all kept sweet," said Miss Bur 
 roughs, who did her full share of water-carrying. 
 
 They carried coal, too, all of them, Miss Bur 
 roughs included, for the coal companies, hard 
 pressed for labor, refused to carry coal up the 
 difficult hill. They would dump it at the bottom, 
 at the entrance to the grounds, or they would not 
 deliver it at all. 
 
 "I just explained it to the girls," said the prin 
 cipal. "I showed them it was really a part of 
 our service to our country, and a mighty small 
 part compared to what our boys were doing with 
 out a word of complaint, and they caught the 
 spirit and the coal-scuttles too. We all did. We 
 
Saving an Idea 59 
 
 brought every piece of coal the school used that 
 winter all the way up this hill. Not a man on the 
 place, you understand. We carried coal and 
 water, tended to our pigs and chickens, cooked, 
 cleaned, and did our school work in a cheerful, 
 happy spirit. You know," she went on thought 
 fully, "I think the hard years were the best ones 
 we had. We built more character. Souls grow 
 under pressure." 
 
 So do ideas the kind Miss Burroughs saved in 
 the back of her head so long. That special idea 
 took a fresh start once the water-works were in, 
 and assumed the shape of a laundry. The girls 
 had done their personal laundry with the primi 
 tive equipment of wooden tubs, but the school had 
 been paying $500 a year for laundering its house 
 hold linen, and its principal has that rarest of 
 business gifts which can turn liabilities into as 
 sets. Since sheets must be laundered, they should 
 bring money in by the process instead of taking 
 it out. If they had a big, modern laundry, the 
 girls who desired to do so could learn the work 
 as a trade, and by taking in outside work, those 
 who needed to earn their school expenses could 
 do so, at least in part, and the school could earn a 
 profit on its investment all instead of paying out 
 $500 a year to somebody else for washing sheets. 
 Miss Burroughs worked it all out after due in 
 vestigation and so convinced her board of trus 
 tees that they told her to go ahead. If she could 
 
60 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 raise $10,000, the remainder could remain on mort 
 gage for a while. One of her trustees told her 
 if she would get $9,000 by a certain date, he 
 .would give her a thousand himself. So she did 
 an amazing thing. 
 
 She went to white contractors, told them she 
 hadn t a cent as yet, and asked them to begin 
 on the building at once ; and they did. When the 
 building was almost finished, a fine, big, modern 
 plant, she was asked, "Have you got the 
 money !" 
 
 * * I haven t tried yet, she answered. " I ve just 
 been preparing for my campaign. I ll get it, be 
 cause God will give it to me. I look to Him, and 
 He never fails me. It s His work. I began it 
 for Him, I take it to Him day by day. When we 
 need anything, I look to Him for it, then I think 
 and pray and work over my part of it the very 
 best I can, and what we need is given. 
 
 A $15,000 building almost finished on pure faith 
 faith of white contractors in a Negro woman, 
 faith of the woman in God ! The school has been 
 run like that throughout its twelve years of life. 
 In the first eleven years $232,000 in cash has gone 
 into it. Of this, the Women s Auxiliary has given 
 $4,300, the white Baptist women, $3,500, a white 
 Oalifornian, $1,000, and a few thousand dollars 
 have come from the students in board. All the 
 remainder has been raised by the principal from 
 people of her own race, and secured while she has 
 
Saving an Idea 61 
 
 been raising the income of the Baptist Women s 
 Auxiliary from $15 a year to $50,000. 
 
 Yet the test of a school is not the money put 
 into it, but the character that comes out of it. 
 By this standard the National Training School is 
 an asset to the nation. No one can see the girls 
 without being impressed with their efficiency and 
 their spirit of service. It is hard to estimate the 
 loss to both races from lack of room at the school 
 for those who apply for admission. 
 
 "But I believe," says the woman who has built 
 all this out of the idea she saved so carefully, 
 "that some day God will move some white per 
 son to give the school something big endowment 
 and equipment to do the best work it is capable 
 of. I ve felt all along that if we colored people 
 could start it and prove that it is worth while 
 and would do our very best for it, that before I 
 am clean worn out and can t do any more, He 
 would put it into the heart of some one of His 
 rich white children to do what we can t endow 
 it and make it a permanent help to my people and 
 my country after I m dead and gone. I pray for 
 that, and I m trusting for it, too. But I m not 
 asking anybody but God for it. It must come 
 from Him." 
 
 Miss Burroughs is at present working to unite 
 the women of her race for mutual service. She is 
 organizing them as workers including artists, 
 teachers, business and professional women, do- 
 
62 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 mestics, and home women in one big group, with 
 out regard to class distinctions. She wants them 
 to stand together as women with common ideals 
 of work, of standards of living, of service, and 
 of self-respect. She wants the most favored 
 women of her race to stand beside the poorest 
 and, in doing so, to give the latter a new respect 
 for themselves and their work, new hope, and new 
 ambition, that, through a better service, they may 
 win a better reward. 
 
 Miss Burroughs influence over her people can 
 hardly be estimated. She has dynamic power. 
 Measured, not as a Negro woman, but as a woman, 
 she has extraordinary ability ; and her living faith 
 in God and in all His children, of whatever race, 
 her spirit of service and sacrifice have energized 
 her gifts as only faith and love can do. 
 
y 
 
 A CITY PASTOR 
 
 THEEE was once a colored boy who thought 
 he would some day be a preacher, but as 
 he grew older, he decided that being a 
 preacher was too poor an occupation for a young 
 man with brains and an education. He wanted 
 to make money and of course that cut preaching 
 out. Yet to-day in a Massachusetts city, William 
 DeBerry is the pastor of one of the largest Con 
 gregational churches for colored people in Amer 
 ica. Far from being as rich as he once hoped to 
 be, he is, however, as happy as the day is long, 
 and he is bringing happiness to hundreds of others 
 every year. 
 
 William DeBerry was born in Nashville, Ten 
 nessee, where for thirty years his father worked 
 in the railroad shops on week-days and preached 
 to his people on Sundays. The boy s idea of 
 preaching came from his father s example and 
 also from his mother, who taught him that to be a 
 preacher was to have the noblest of opportunities. 
 
 The boy had a well-developed bump of per 
 sistence. This characteristic was evident even 
 when William was a little chap, for one bitterly 
 cold day he nearly turned himself into an icicle 
 
 63 
 
64 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 finishing up something that was almost too much 
 for him almost, but not quite. On this day he 
 was outdoors, not too warmly clad, when an old 
 Negro came by leading a horse and asking the way 
 to the mill, which was on the edge of town. The 
 old man could not understand the child s direc 
 tions, and William, not having been out long 
 enough to realize how cold it was, became sud 
 denly fired with a great ambition. He offered to 
 go with the man to the mill if he could ride the 
 horse. In a moment he was lifted to the horse s 
 back, and rode off gloriously, the envy of all 
 his playmates. But it was two or three miles 
 to the mill. The weather was making a new low 
 record, and a high wind cut like ice. The little 
 boy ached with cold and nearly cried with it. His 
 hands could scarcely hold the reins. He wished he 
 had stayed at home. He longed to get down on 
 his poor frozen toes and dance to warm them. 
 But he had said he would ride to the mill, so he 
 tried to set his chattering teeth and went on. 
 When they reached the mill, the boy was just a 
 little frozen lump, too stiff to stand, at first. "But 
 I managed to limber up a little walking home, 
 he said, laughing. "I was glad I hadn t said I d 
 ride both ways." 
 
 A few years after this, when he was about 
 ten years old, the city was repairing its streets 
 with macadam, and many small boys of both races 
 broke the stone for the roadways. They called 
 
A City Pastor 65 
 
 it " pecking " stone. The boy who persisted till 
 he "pecked a perch" a pile of rock a foot high 
 and five and a half feet each way was awarded 
 with the munificent sum of fifty cents. So William 
 decided to peck a perch. He worked after school 
 every day and at last received a slip of paper giv 
 ing an order on the paving company for half a 
 dollar. To get it cashed, the boy had to go two 
 or three miles, from away out in North Nashville 
 nearly to the river, but that was a small matter. 
 He trotted off gaily, got his money, and turned 
 back home, when a wonderful thing happened ! A 
 man asked him to hold his horse for him. When 
 he came back, he gave the boy a whole silver 
 dime just for holding a horse ! 
 
 William never knew quite how he got home ; he 
 thinks maybe he flew. But in any case, he rushed 
 in to his mother, almost bursting with excitement, 
 and thrust all his wealth into her hands. 
 
 I earned it myself!" he shouted joyfully. 
 
 It s to buy you a dress with. I earned it! Go 
 get a dress!" 
 
 And so she did. All the way to town she 
 walked and bought with fifty cents calico enough 
 to make a dress. The ten cents she would not 
 take; William must spend that for himself. But 
 the dress! How they both loved and admired 
 it, and how proudly the mother wore it, with her 
 boy who had given it to her walking beside her! 
 
 William attended public school until he was 
 
 a 
 it 
 
66 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 about fourteen, when his father thought he should 
 go to work. He il hired out" in the country that 
 summer, tending to the horse, doing the chores, 
 helping in the garden. He was very proud of 
 having money of his own, and he meant to get a 
 place in one of the hotels in the fall. He had 
 quite sufficient education, he thought, to preach 
 when he was old enough. 
 
 But in the fall a friend who was entering the 
 preparatory school at Fisk University persuaded 
 him to go to school again. His mother was very 
 much pleased that her boy should want more of 
 an education. But his father, who lived usefully 
 with very little book-learning, was doubtful about 
 so much schooling doing William any good. How 
 ever, he did not oppose his wife s wishes, and the 
 boy entered Fisk. Once started, he stuck to his 
 work. 
 
 The same quality of persistence helped the boy 
 to win in the preparatory school a scholarship 
 which aided him year after year. He worked hard 
 during vacation, spending two summers in a saw 
 mill. In the fall he did odd jobs in the hotels. 
 After entering college at Fisk, he taught school 
 in the summer except for one year when he was 
 a porter on a Pullman car a year that tested 
 him as no year had done yet. 
 
 He went to Cincinnati for this job, and a friend 
 lent him his carfare and ten dollars over. He 
 
A City Pastor 67 
 
 carried letters of recommendation from Dr. Cra- 
 vath, the president of Fisk, from the school 
 superintendents where he had taught, and from 
 several white people for whom he had worked. 
 But in Cincinnati he was met by other Nashville 
 boys who told him no more porters were being 
 engaged, they had all applied in vain. Yet he 
 went to see for himself. The man who employed 
 the porters was out, he was told, not to return 
 until morning. He spent the afternoon look 
 ing for other work, but without success. The next 
 morning he returned to the Pullman office. 
 
 "There s the boss," said the office boy. "He 
 won t give you a job, but there he is." 
 
 The "boss" was talking with friends, among 
 whom was a lady. Young DeBerry knew that if 
 he interrupted the man to ask for a job, he would 
 be told, as his friends had been, that there were 
 no vacancies. So he walked up to the great man s 
 desk, without a word laid before him his sheaf of 
 recommendations, and stepped back, waiting in 
 silence. 
 
 The "boss," not knowing what the papers con 
 tained, read them. Then he turned. "Are you 
 William DeBerry?" he demanded. 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "What do you want?" 
 
 "A porter s job on a Pullman." 
 
 "Can you fill out an application blank?" 
 
68 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Then go fill out this one and bring it here 
 to me." 
 
 He could scarcely believe his good fortune. He 
 filled out that blank with the greatest care. 
 
 "Did you write this yourself?" inquired the 
 man. 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Well, I ll take you if you can buy your uni 
 form. You must pay twenty-five dollars for it, 
 cash down. Can you get it f " 
 
 "Yes, sir," came the instant reply. ("I knew 
 I could get it some way," he said afterwards, 
 "because I just had to, and I had ten dollars 
 toward it in my pocket.") 
 
 "Very well," said the boss. "Here s the ad 
 dress of the tailor. You can report for duty to 
 morrow. 
 
 The tailor was an old Jew. William told him 
 his story and showed his recommendations. He 
 offered ten dollars cash and a draft for fifteen 
 dollars on his first month s wages. The old man 
 shook his head. 
 
 I never give credit, he said. Then he paused, 
 read over the letters again, and looked at De- 
 Berry with sharp eyes. "I believe you re hon 
 est," he said, "and I ll take a chance on you, since 
 you want an education. Here s the suit. 
 
 So began the young man s best summer for 
 money-making. He was sent first to help an old 
 
A City Pastor 69 
 
 porter who taught him his duties. This man, of 
 fering him a cigarette one day, was astonished 
 to learn that DeBerry neither smoked nor drank. 
 
 "Well, you ll do both pretty soon," he said. 
 "If you aren t smoking and taking a drink in two 
 months, I ll give you a new uniform myself." He 
 failed to do this, however, even though two months 
 later he had to admit that his prophecy had not 
 come true. 
 
 When DeBerry finished his first run as a full- 
 fledged porter, the conductor handed him a roll of 
 bills, saying it was his half of the "cutting." 
 He knew already that the conductor was keep 
 ing back some of the company s money, be 
 cause he had not given him the checks to certain 
 berths for which passengers had paid on the train 
 rather than in the station. The conductor was re 
 quired to give the porter checks for all berths oc 
 cupied, and these checks, turned in by the porter 
 at the end of the run, must tally with the cash 
 given in by the conductor. But if porter and con 
 ductor agreed to steal or "cut," as they called 
 it the money of those passengers who paid on 
 the train, the checks were destroyed, and there 
 was no way for the company to find them out. 
 Many conductors kept the money for such fares, 
 dividing it with the porter at the end of the run. 
 This insured the porter s silence and made the 
 conductor safe. 
 
 When the conductor gave him the money, De- 
 
70 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 Berry was frightened. If he refused it, he was 
 sure the conductor would suspect him of wanting 
 to better himself with the company by reporting 
 the conductor, and that official would probably pro 
 tect himself against this imaginary danger by 
 making up some complaint against him and so 
 have him dismissed. He couldn t afford to lose 
 his job, it would mean dropping out of college. 
 Anyway, it was the conductor s stealing, not his, 
 he tried to think. So he took the money for that 
 and for several trips afterward. 
 
 But the young man kept getting more and more 
 miserable. His mother had taught him from his 
 babyhood that he must be honest no matter what 
 happened, and he knew he wasn t honest now. At 
 last he felt that he would rather lose his job and 
 drop out of his class than to take the money again. 
 When he refused it, the conductor could hardly 
 believe his ears. 
 
 "Why, you re a fool," he said. "Everybody 
 does it. Here, take it as a present from me; 
 you ve got nothing to do with where it came 
 from. 
 
 When he still refused, the conductor was angry, 
 thinking DeBerry meant to report him. He as 
 sured him he would not, but the conductor did not 
 trust him. He warned all the other conductors not 
 to "cut" when they had DeBerry along, he was 
 queer and wouldn t go halves, and he might tell. 
 So nobody offered him any more money. Soon 
 
A City Pastor 71 
 
 afterward, William was assigned to an old con 
 ductor who had been with the company thirty 
 years and had never "cut" a dollar. He stayed 
 with this man, who turned in some report on the 
 young porter which brought him an unusual trust. 
 At the ends of the run the conductor changed to 
 another car, and DeBerry, in sole charge, col 
 lected the money paid for these short-distance 
 rides, sending in his own reports. He was very 
 happy over being trusted a young Negro, only 
 four months on the road. 
 
 William had decided by this time that preach 
 ing was out of the question for him ; he would be 
 a doctor. He knew a good many preachers, and 
 few of them were educated men. Most of those 
 he met were ignorant leaders of ignorant folk. 
 The Church, he thought, was given over to emo 
 tionalism and superstition or to blind ignorance, 
 which was almost as bad. He did not respect the 
 institution as he had when he himself was igno 
 rant. Besides, ministers never made any money, 
 and money he meant to have money and the com 
 forts and power money brings. 
 
 While he was in his senior year at Fisk, De- 
 Berry went to Dr. Hubbard, the dean of Meharry 
 Medical College, also at Nashville. Dr. Hubbard 
 knew the young man s record as a student and was 
 glad to have him enter Meharry. He knew noth 
 ing of William s old determination to be a 
 preacher. He offered him a position as tutor in 
 
72 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 Latin at the college, the income from which would 
 help him through his course. He should be happy 
 now, William thought, with most of his struggles 
 behind him and the way to a profession clear. But 
 instead, he was very unhappy. The inward strug 
 gle was acute. 
 
 One of his teachers at Fisk sensed his difficulty. 
 She would not urge him, but she asked him what 
 he thought was the need of his people for edu 
 cated ministers as leaders. He found it a hard 
 question to put out of his mind. Then she lent him 
 Drummond s Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 
 and the book left him with a new sense of the 
 world s need of God s love and of ministers to in 
 terpret it. Not long afterward, Mr. Moore, field 
 agent of the American Missionary Association, 
 came to Fisk as a lecturer. He talked at chapel 
 about the Negro Church. 
 
 "Some of you young people," he said, "think 
 you ve outgrown the Church, you think you re too 
 educated for it. You look down on it because you 
 think its ministers are ignorant. I want to know 
 which of you who criticize the Church in this way 
 is willing to give your life to make conditions 
 better?" 
 
 "That question," says Dr. DeBerry, "was 
 meant for me. God meant it for me. I couldn t 
 get away from it, day or night. I went to Dr. 
 Hubbard at last and told him I couldn t come to 
 Meharry. I had to preach." 
 
A City Pastor 73 
 
 DeBerry went to Oberlin for his theological 
 course and won a scholarship. He was assigned 
 to a little church where he preached on Sundays 
 and during vacation. In this way, together with 
 the scholarship, he worked his way through to 
 graduation. 
 
 He wanted to work among his people in the 
 South, where he felt the need was greatest, but 
 when he graduated, there was no opening in a 
 Southern Congregational church. The home mis 
 sion board advised his going temporarily to a 
 small church in Springfield, Massachusetts, whose 
 pastor had just died. He went, expecting to 
 stay only until he could find an opening in the 
 South. He has remained in Springfield twenty- 
 two years. 
 
 St. John s Church had about a hundred mem 
 bers when William DeBerry became its pastor. 
 There was no parsonage, but they wanted a mar 
 ried preacher. This suited the young man beau 
 tifully. He went back to Tennessee and married 
 the girl who was waiting for him, another Fisk 
 graduate, and brought her to Springfield. Of 
 course a parsonage had to be built then. With his 
 wife to help him, the new pastor began to build up 
 his work in earnest. 
 
 While he was still hoping for the Southern open 
 ing, the missionary authorities of his church be 
 gan to send him to large white gatherings and to 
 churches to speak of church work among the Ne- 
 
74 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 groes and to tell what the chnrch schools were ac 
 complishing. He knew the need as only a Negro 
 could; he knew what the work of the Church 
 meant in his own life and in that of his friends ; 
 and his heart was burdened for his race. He spoke 
 with such force and effect that wherever he went, 
 he made friends for his people and for the effort 
 to help them. At last the Missionary Association 
 urged him to stay in the North. They felt he could 
 do more for his people in this way than in any 
 other. 
 
 For years Mr. DeBerry s church grew stead 
 ily in members, in liberality, and in the regard 
 of the white churches of the city. But he him 
 self was not satisfied. He had received calls to 
 several large churches, and now one came from 
 his home city of Nashville. He told his people 
 he could not stay with them unless they would 
 undertake a broader service to the colored com 
 munity of Springfield. He wanted a church that 
 would be open seven days in the week, helping 
 people on work days and rest days alike. It 
 seemed an almost impossible undertaking, but the 
 elders were willing to follow their leader. The 
 church raised the first thousand dollars in cash 
 toward a new church and then went to work to 
 raise more. "With this backing, Dr. DeBerry went 
 to the white church and to white friends. The re 
 sult is a big, modern church on a large corner lot. 
 It has a beautiful organ and fine institutional 
 
A City Pastor 75 
 
 equipment. There are large, well-furnished par 
 lors, with a piano and a victrola, magazines and 
 books, a sub-station of the public library. Prayer- 
 meetings are held here on Thursday nights, but on 
 all other week nights the rooms are open to vari 
 ous clubs for women and girls under the care of a 
 trained worker. Three hundred are enrolled in 
 these clubs. Downstairs is a big room with mov 
 able seats for Sunday-school and for entertain 
 ments. Here also are kindergarten rooms, the 
 church kitchen, and rooms for classes in cooking 
 and in arts and crafts. 
 
 The clubs for boys and young men, which have 
 a hundred members enrolled, are in a building 
 around the corner, where are billiard tables, 
 games, books, and magazines. A brass band flour 
 ishes here also. A printing-press has just been 
 bought, and printing and other trades are to be 
 taught. There is an employment bureau for men 
 in this building, and one for women in the parish 
 house. 
 
 Next door to the church is the parish home for 
 working girls, which cost $15,000. It contains an 
 apartment for the pastor s family and rooms for 
 fourteen girls. It is tastefully furnished and 
 beautifully kept. Mrs. DeBerry acts as matron. 
 The rooms are always full, with a waiting list for 
 vacancies. Parlors and an office are on the first 
 floor. In the basement there is a well-equipped 
 laundry and a kitchen for the girls use, with small 
 
76 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 individual lockers in which each girl may keep 
 her stock of groceries. 
 
 During the war the munition factories of 
 Springfield attracted numbers of colored workers, 
 and the housing situation became acute. A white 
 friend of St. John s bought a large apartment 
 house and let it to colored people under the 
 church s management. Later, the property was 
 deeded to the church. Other friends who believe 
 in the pastor and in the kind of spiritual and so 
 cial upbuilding he is doing, followed this example. 
 St. John s now owns a number of small houses 
 in addition to the apartment house and provides 
 shelter for twenty-eight families. The net rent 
 from these properties goes to the support of the 
 institutional work. Recently a farm of fifty-four 
 acres was given to the church. This is being used 
 for vacation groups of boys and men. A Hampton 
 graduate in agriculture has charge of the place. 
 The vacation guests this summer have given their 
 mornings to work on the farm and their after 
 noons to fishing, games, and various sports. This 
 part of the work is as yet in its earliest stages of 
 development. 
 
 The church members are no exception to their 
 race in point of liberality. Like most colored 
 Christians, they put white people to shame when 
 it comes to " giving as the Lord hath prospered." 
 The membership is divided into circles, each unit 
 of which does his or her part in a cheerful spirit 
 
A City Pastor 11 
 
 of teamwork. But the expenses are heavy, and 
 the church could not meet them all, even with the 
 help of the rents. Including the pastor, eleven 
 paid workers are necessary, eight of them giving 
 full time to the work. In the lean days since the 
 war, there is the same unemployment and suffer 
 ing among the Negroes as among the white poor. 
 Some help has been given by the white Congrega 
 tional church, but for the social work the principal 
 aid comes from the Springfield Community Chest. 
 This fund receives the gifts of all citizens for all 
 forms of community service. The trustees appor 
 tion it among carefully-selected agencies. To St. 
 John s is entrusted the amount set aside for social 
 work among the colored people of the city. 
 
 Dr. DeBerry, in addition to his work in Spring 
 field and his wider work for his people in the Con 
 gregational Church, has been made a trustee of 
 Fisk University, his alma mater an honor which 
 any college graduate appreciates. The Inter- 
 church World Movement, after its recent survey 
 of American churches, reported this church of a 
 colored Tenriesseean as having "the most efficient 
 system of organization and work of any church in 
 the group surveyed, regardless of race or de 
 nomination." The man who is called to be a phy 
 sician has a noble calling; but the man who is 
 called to preach and answers with his whole life 
 need not fear that he will be shut up to a service 
 less than the best. 
 
VI 
 A BELIEVER IN HAPPINESS 
 
 NOT so very many years ago there lived in 
 Georgia a little colored girl who needed no 
 fairy godmother for she had some of the 
 most beautiful gifts in the world. One of them 
 was a mother of remarkable character and insight ; 
 one was an inborn spirit of happiness which noth 
 ing could dampen and which those around her 
 found contagious ; and one was an opportunity for 
 development such as few children of her race and 
 generation dreamed of. 
 
 Janie s mother, a widow, was housemaid and 
 seamstress in the home of a Northern woman of 
 wealth and education who lived in the South for 
 a number of years. The little colored girl came 
 to the white home with her mother. The children 
 in the family were about her own. age, and they 
 all played together, as would have been the case 
 in any household while they were little. The white 
 children found something oddly attractive about 
 Janie. It wasn t just that she was pretty or that 
 she had loose, wavy hair and a skin no darker 
 than an Italian s or that wherever she was, a good 
 time was sure to be going on; it was something 
 that belonged to her soul a kind of delight in liv- 
 
 78 
 
A Believer in Happiness 79 
 
 ing and a love of living things that radiated all 
 about her. The white children and their mother 
 really loved her. 
 
 When her mother married again and went 
 back and forth to work between her own home and 
 her employer s, Janie was kept at the "big house" 
 and became almost a member of the family. The 
 children were read to a great deal, and Janie was 
 always an interested listener. As the years went 
 on, she gained a knowledge and love of good lit 
 erature such as only favored folk can have. She 
 was very prettily dressed, her room was daintily 
 furnished, and all her surroundings were those 
 of refinement and ease. She knew little of school, 
 but her education from reading and from her asso 
 ciations was superior to that of most of her race. 
 
 Life went on pleasantly for the children until 
 they grew old enough for their continued com 
 panionship to seem strange to the neighbors. The 
 mistress of the house loved Janie and was un 
 willing to send her away to live among untaught 
 Negroes. The life of the average colored woman 
 seemed terribly hard to the Northern white 
 woman, and she offered to send Janie North, to 
 give her as good an education as could be had 
 there, and to establish her afterward in some com 
 munity where her race would not be known and 
 where life would be easy and pleasant. 
 
 "But of course," she said to the child s mother, 
 "you must give her up. You must make me her 
 
80 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 legal guardian and agree never to see her again. 
 You will do this because it is for her good and 
 because you love her." 
 
 But the mother would not hear of it. She was 
 wise enough to know that no good can come to 
 those who run away from the obligations into 
 which they are born. Janie was colored, she 
 said; she had had a wonderful chance in life, so 
 far ; she must share it with her people. She might 
 go North for her education, her mother would 
 be most grateful, but she must come back South 
 to live and work. Furthermore, her mother would 
 never give her up. 
 
 They argued for days. The white woman, firm 
 in what she thought was right, refused to do any 
 thing more for the child unless she were given to 
 her outright. The mother, equally determined, 
 took Janie home and prepared to give her such 
 an education as she could afford. 
 
 Janie s step-father was a prosperous Negro, a 
 worker in the railroad shops. He had been taught, 
 as a slave, the trade of a mechanic and had been 
 allowed to "hire his time" before the Civil War; 
 that is, he had worked where he pleased, paying 
 his master a yearly sum to offset what he might 
 have been worth as a slave, and keeping the rest 
 himself. When the War ended, he had money 
 enough to buy some land and build himself a home. 
 He had worked and saved ever since. He meant 
 to do as well by his step-daughter as by her half- 
 
Photo by Foster, Richmond, Va, 
 MRS. JANIE PORTER BARRETT 
 
A Believer in Happiness 81 
 
 sisters, his own children. Janie s mother, too, had 
 worked and saved; and if Northern colleges were 
 beyond their means, Hampton wasn t; they would 
 send her there. 
 
 The white woman was aghast. "Oh, Janie," 
 she wept, "I ve ruined your life! It s a work 
 school! They require rough work such as you 
 have never done, and there are rough students 
 there, such as I never meant you to know. Child, 
 you ll have to scrub floors there I ve seen them 
 do it. Think of your having to scrub floors !" 
 
 Janie had no wild desire to scrub, and she felt 
 a bit dashed for a minute; but her belief in the 
 happy possibilities of life was not to be daunted. 
 Something rose up within her and answered al 
 most without her knowledge. 
 
 "I don t believe you ve ruined my life," she 
 said stoutly; "I don t see why I can t do some 
 thing for my people yet that will be worth all 
 you ve done for me and worth the floor-scrub 
 bing too." 
 
 Years afterward she said she hadn t an idea of 
 doing anything for her people when she spoke; 
 she didn t know where the words came from. She 
 wanted to make her weeping friend happy; and 
 in the crisis, the deepest thing in her, unknown to 
 her as yet, stirred to life and spoke. 
 
 So she went to Hampton and scrubbed floors, 
 and incidentally scrubbed the skin off her knees. 
 
 "I hated scrubbing floors," she said, laughing 
 
82 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 as she told of it. "I d never learned how. But 
 I had learned that I must obey, so whatever they 
 told me to do, I did the best I could, whether 
 I liked it or not; and I learned." 
 
 But helping her people! She didn t want to. 
 Everybody thought it so great and solemn an 
 obligation. Janie hated solemn things she 
 wanted fun. She was homesick for the old home, 
 the old friends, the old, beautiful refinements of 
 life. Why should she scrub floors or help ignorant 
 folk? 
 
 Then one day she read a book Walter Bes- 
 ant s All Sorts and Conditions of Men. All young 
 people should read it. "The Palace of Delight" 
 would intrigue their hearts as it did hers; and 
 perhaps it would change their lives as it did hers. 
 
 "Why, that s helping folks to make them 
 happy ! she exclaimed. * It needn t be solemn at 
 all. I d love to help that way; and I will." 
 
 Her head was full of the idea after that, and 
 her heart too. When she graduated, Janie chose, 
 out of several places offered her, to teach a school 
 in a little community in the "wire-grass country," 
 one of the most backward places in Georgia at 
 that time. The salary could hardly be discovered 
 without a microscope. 
 
 "Why, child," gasped her mother, "are you 
 crazy? That s no place for you to go to!" 
 
 "I don t believe they ever have much fun down 
 there, Janie answered. " I m going to give them 
 
A Believer in Happiness 83 
 
 a good time. Of course I can t live on the salary ; 
 but you can help me out. 
 
 Janie s mother always had stood by her, and 
 she did now. 
 
 They had a good time in that community that 
 year. Janie visited the children s homes week 
 ends to find out what they needed most. Such 
 places! Poor souls, no outlook on life at all 
 just a grind of work and poverty and deprivation. 
 She taught the children calisthenics and games. 
 They played. They bought some croquet sets and 
 learned the game. They had picnics and trips in 
 the woods. They learned in school, too. And the 
 white people were all kind. Janie was told they 
 wouldn t be, but they were. 
 
 Then she was offered a position at Hampton, 
 and in the fall went to Virginia for life. 
 
 In 1889 she married Harris Barrett, a Hamp 
 ton graduate who, from his graduation until his 
 death in 1915, was cashier and bookkeeper at 
 Hampton. He took her to the home he had bought 
 for her, and for years they worked over it to 
 gether until it became a beautiful place. One 
 rule they made and never broke: nothing was 
 ever to go into the home that was not theirs, 
 paid cash for to the last cent before it entered 
 the house. The furniture came piece by piece, 
 and was the better loved for that reason. But 
 Janie had to have some lovely things to start with. 
 She called her home the " Palace of Delight," be- 
 
84 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 cause she meant it to be that to everybody around 
 her ; and though a palace might be short on fur 
 niture, what there was of it must be dainty and 
 beautiful. She asked her mother to give her only 
 the plainest and most necessary clothes for her 
 wedding outfit, but to buy her some household 
 linen and solid silver. 
 
 " Silver!" gasped her mother. "I can t fit you 
 out with solid silver, child." 
 
 "Oh, no," agreed Janie; "I don t want to be 
 * fitted out ; but I want a table like the one I was 
 brought up to see every day with flowers and 
 the whitest cloth and enough silver spoons and 
 forks for us two to eat with. I can t have tin 
 spoons on my palace table ! 
 
 So she had silver things from her mother and 
 from her many friends at the Institute, and added 
 to them, piece by piece, through the years. When 
 her home was furnished, with a good many gaps 
 where pretty things were going to be some day, 
 yet dainty and attractive as far as it went, she 
 hunted up people to give a good time in it. 
 
 She found them literally at her gate the little 
 black children turned out in the streets to shift 
 for themselves while their mothers cooked or 
 washed all day. Mrs. Barrett scrubbed them 
 clean and told them stories and played games with 
 them. In no time she had a whole kindergarten 
 on her hands. Evenings she coaxed in the 
 mothers and the young folks, who had so little 
 
A Believer in Happiness 85 
 
 chance for clean, happy fun in their lives, and 
 some of the men. She formed clubs for all of 
 them. While they were having a good time, she 
 showed them all sorts of ways of better and 
 healthier and happier living. By and by the 
 "Palace of Delight " wasn t big enough to hold 
 the people who flocked to it. 
 
 All this time Mrs. Barrett and her husband were 
 saving money for a bathroom. She wouldn t have 
 one until she could have the kind she wanted, 
 white-tiled, with a set-in tub, and a beautiful big 
 bowl, a bathroom to enjoy for a lifetime. It 
 would cost several hundred dollars; and at last 
 the money was ready. There was nothing to do 
 but select the fixtures and engage the workmen, 
 when in came, quite uninvited, the most discon 
 certing thought! 
 
 For a long time Mrs. Barrett had tried tre 
 mendously hard to get the mothers in her clubs 
 to love cleanliness. You have to love it very much 
 to keep your home and children clean when you 
 wash or cook for other people all day and are tired 
 out when you get home. Mrs. Barrett never had 
 to work out, the mothers said; she had time to 
 be clean, and they didn t. Now if she had a bath 
 room a lovely, shining, white place with hot and 
 cold water on tap instead of stone-cold in a well 
 down the street, and a big porcelain tub instead 
 of an old wash-tub to bathe in oh, she could never 
 do anything with them again! They would say, 
 
86 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 "You don t know anything about our hard times 
 you with your comforts and conveniences. Let 
 us alone ! 
 
 She thought about it a long time. She did 
 so want that bathroom! She had dreamed about 
 it so long! But at last she decided she wanted 
 happiness more everybody s happiness, which 
 is the only real kind, though everybody doesn t 
 know it yet. She talked it over with her hus 
 band, who always understood things, and they 
 decided to spend the bathroom money on a com 
 munity house to be built in their own yard. When 
 the clubs gave entertainments, as they constantly 
 did, the house wouldn t hold the people any more. 
 They needed a great big room. And so, by love s 
 magic, the bathroom became a house that was all 
 one big room and could be used by turns for a 
 kindergarten, a bad-weather play-ground, a club 
 house, a gymnasium, a reading, assembly, concert, 
 and lecture room surely the most Protean bath 
 room ever known. 
 
 The work Mrs. Barrett was doing broadened 
 until it touched the whole colored community. 
 Teachers and students at Hampton helped, and 
 many an Institute boy and girl found there inspi 
 ration for community service in their own far-off 
 homes. Love is always like that a seed that 
 grows, bearing other seeds that fly on the winds 
 of life to all sorts of unsuspected spots. The 
 
A Believer in Happiness 87 
 
 "Palace of Delight " came true, too big for the 
 walls of any one building to hold. 
 
 Mrs. Barrett s work did more than leaven the 
 Negro community: it built a bridge between the 
 races. Long before the women s federated clubs 
 generally adopted "Clean-up Week," a civic- 
 minded white woman of Hampton, a leader in so 
 cial circles, planned a "Clean-up" for her town. 
 She knew it would never be clean without the 
 Negroes help, and having heard of Mrs. Barrett s 
 work, she asked her help with the colored people. 
 Thus brought together, the two women became 
 friends, with large consequences, as the sequel will 
 show. 
 
 During these happy years, tho colored club 
 women of Virginia made Mrs. Barrett their state 
 president. They had a small, struggling organiza 
 tion with a very few hundred members. 
 
 "And it will never be any bigger," thought the 
 president, "until it does something together 
 something for somebody else and together. 
 
 Who needed happiness most? Girls needed it, 
 surely ; girls who grew up without care, either be 
 cause their mothers were dead or because they 
 had to work away from home all day so that 
 their children grew up in the streets and never had 
 any chance. Her heart had often ached over such 
 girls. Sometimes they stole something a trifle, 
 usually, or they got into some other trouble the 
 
88 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 police had to notice. Then they were sent to jail 
 and shut up with hardened criminals ; not taught 
 anything useful or good, but shut up where there 
 was nothing to learn but sin. And yet they were 
 just children who had had no chance. Couldn t 
 the fortunate colored women of the clubs do some 
 thing to help these girls? Perhaps the thought of 
 her own two protected daughters helped her to 
 see the need of these unfortunate girls who were 
 neglected. 
 
 So she and all the club women went to work. 
 
 "We must show Virginia that colored women 
 can be useful as citizens/ said the president; 
 "that we can and will serve our state in a worth 
 while way. We will take this poor human wreck 
 age that is such a dead loss and waste and turn it 
 into an asset for the state. " 
 
 They worked three years, that handful of 
 women, and they raised $5,300. They bought a 
 farm of a hundred and forty acres at Peake, 
 eighteen miles from Bichmond. Mrs. Barrett 
 wrote Dr. Hart, head of the Child Welfare De 
 partment of the Eussell Sage Foundation, for ad 
 vice about plans for an industrial training school, 
 and he gave her the best the Foundation had. 
 The school was to be built on the cottage plan, 
 that the girls might have the home life they had 
 missed. The first cottage, built of concrete and 
 brick, was for thirty girls and cost $8,000. 
 
 The women wanted the state to help. It did 
 
A Believer in Happiness 89 
 
 nothing now for delinquent colored girls, and they 
 wanted an appropriation for the building. To 
 get it, they knew they must have white people on 
 their board of trustees. So Mrs. Barrett went 
 to the civic-minded white woman who believed in 
 "clean-up week." She was interested at once. 
 Soon she had secured the white half of the board 
 herself, and two Richmond women distinguished 
 in club and social life, the rector of General Lee s 
 old church in Richmond, a prominent business 
 man, and one or two others. Mrs. Barrett se 
 cured Negroes equally well-known among their 
 people for her half of the board; and then the 
 white and colored women went together to the 
 legislature. The committee agreed to recommend 
 an appropriation of $3,000, and two white women 
 promised $2,000 more. 
 
 It was about this time that Mrs. Barrett s great 
 sorrow came. Her husband died. For twenty-five 
 years they had lived in understanding love. One 
 can only state the loss and leave it. 
 
 Dr. Hart wrote her that when the house at 
 Peake was built, she ought to take charge of it 
 herself. "You had the vision," he said; "you 
 must go there and make it come true." 
 
 She showed the letter to a white friend in some 
 indignation. "I go to Peake!" she exclaimed; 
 "and leave my lovely home and my friends and 
 all my pretty things to eat in an institution din 
 ing-room off thick plates with tin forks! Of 
 
90 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 course I m going to work for it harder than ever; 
 but to live there !" 
 
 Her friend looked at her a minute and then said 
 quietly, "Of course, if you don t feel you ought 
 to go, that settles it." 
 
 Somehow she could not get away from these 
 words. Then came a telegram from Eichmond. 
 The legislature, about to pass the appropriation, 
 had received a protest from the white people of 
 the Peake community; they didn t want the school 
 there. "The legislature won t give the money 
 in the face of this protest," telegraphed one of 
 the white women trustees. "What shall I do?" 
 
 Mrs. Barrett answered, "Beg them to give us 
 one chance to try us. If the school proves ob 
 jectionable, I promise to move it." 
 
 "That settled me," she said, laughing a little 
 as she told the story. "I had promised to move it, 
 and I wasn t going to move it, so it was up to 
 me to make it succeed. I went there to live, and 
 I ve been there ever since." 
 
 "You must miss your home," it was suggested. 
 
 She looked sober for a minute and then laughed. 
 
 "Oh, well, I carried my silver spoons and 
 sometimes, on grand occasions, I use them. My 
 two girls have been so sweet about it. And the 
 other girls did you notice when you went over 
 the place any difference between the girls in the 
 new cottage the fifty-nine new-comers and the 
 honor girls in the first cottage?" 
 
A Believer in Happiness 91 
 
 "I certainly did," was the reply. "The honor 
 girls had a look it was as though something in 
 side of them had waked up." 
 
 " That s it," she cried. " That s it exactly! 
 Their souls wake up. There is scarcely a girl 
 there who isn t a Christian, and their lives and 
 their work show it. We fail sometimes ; but when 
 our girls go out on parole they nearly all make 
 good. Most of them go out to service until they 
 marry. They all know how to make a good home 
 when they leave us. Some of them win scholar 
 ships in good schools and become teachers. Some 
 of our old girls teach here now." 
 
 During the World War Mrs. Barrett had a sur 
 prise. One afternoon when she was out, a party 
 of white people came from Washington, inspected 
 everything on the place, and went off. Soon after, 
 there came from the federal government an offer 
 of $20,000 to enlarge the place for work among 
 the colored girls around the Virginia camps, if the 
 state would give $20,000 to match it. The state 
 did, promptly, and two buildings were erected 
 which were crowded all during the war. 
 
 The first cottage is the "honor cottage" to 
 which the best girls are promoted with privi 
 leges after proving their trustworthiness. The 
 girls in this honor cottage are those whose faces 
 showed so plainly the spirit which had been kin 
 dled within them. In the white uniforms which 
 they are allowed to wear on Sundays and special 
 
92 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 occasions, they are a happy, promising looking 
 group. 
 
 The third building is a big one, midway between 
 the other two, and still little more than a shell. 
 It was a crowded dormitory in war days, a real 
 emergency building, where many a neglected girl 
 obtained shelter and care and a start toward 
 better things. It is used now for class-rooms, for 
 entertainments, and for industries. Eventually it 
 will be finished and equipped in a manner worthy 
 of the great commonwealth to which it belongs. 
 This faith which Virginia has in the work the 
 school is doing was strikingly shown two or three 
 years ago when the state legislature passed the 
 following resolution : 
 
 Whereas, it has come to the knowledge of the General Assembly 
 that most valuable and important services have been rendered by 
 the colored women of the State of Virginia, known and organized 
 as the "Virginia State Federation of Colored Women s Clubs," and 
 
 Whereas, this organization originated, raised funds for, and 
 established an institution for the reform of wayward colored 
 girls in the establishment of the Industrial Home School at 
 Peake, Hanover County, Virginia, which has met with signal 
 success and performed services of reform and conservation at 
 this vital time, when all the services of all the people are so 
 sorely needed, 
 
 Therefore, be it resolved, by the House of Delegates, the Senate 
 concurring, that the services and sacrifices on the part of these 
 citizens be recognized, and that this resolution express our ap 
 preciation of this work looking to the betterment of the morals 
 of the State of Virginia. 
 
 Certainly Mrs. Barrett has made good. Of the 
 white neighbors who feared to have such an insti- 
 
A Believer in Happiness 93 
 
 tution come among them, not one can be found 
 to-day who is not a warm friend of the school. In 
 the state, appreciation of the work has so grown 
 that support of it, at first entirely borne by the 
 colored women, and then shared by them and the 
 state, has been entirely taken over by the state. 
 
 But that isn t the whole story. Loving-kind 
 ness is a very contagious thing. Down in South 
 Carolina the State Commissioner of Charities and 
 Correction heard of Peake, and so did the colored 
 women s clubs. They decided that the colored 
 women should begin a similar work in their state, 
 the Commissioner to help them in every way he 
 could. Accordingly, the South Carolina colored 
 women started a school. They have run it now 
 for two years, and they have done so well with 
 it that if it had not been for the after-the-war 
 money troubles of the country and the farmers 
 losses in cotton, the state would probably have 
 taken it over before this. But even though that 
 step must wait, the white people are helping in 
 other ways. 
 
 So good work spreads. As time goes on, there 
 will be more schools and fewer prisons every 
 where because people will see more and more 
 clearly that the just and sensible thing to do is 
 to take care of the children who have had no 
 chance, and more people will understand the re 
 sponsibility their own opportunities have placed 
 upon them. 
 
VII 
 A BUILDER OF PROSPERITY 
 
 IN Nottoway County, Virginia, in a little coun 
 try village lives John Pierce, a man who 
 serves his country in eight states. He is a 
 Negro, and his service is primarily to his own 
 people; yet it is of scarcely less importance to 
 white people than to his own race. 
 
 The reasons for this fact are plain. All mer 
 chants are helped when ill-housed, poorly-clad, un 
 derfed people become able to buy lumber and 
 plumbing and electric lights and screens and rugs 
 and furniture, to build and furnish comfortable 
 homes. The grocers and butchers and dry-goods 
 men make more money when those who have been 
 poor become able to buy plenty of good food and 
 comfortable clothes. They will soon want farm 
 machinery, too, and automobiles and fertilizers 
 and books and musical instruments and life and 
 fire insurance everything, in fact, that anybody 
 in America makes a living by selling. 
 
 People who are prospering also have money to 
 put in banks. If the government needs to borrow 
 money, these people can lend it. The Negroes 
 in the South were once an almost beggared folk, 
 but during the World War, a single business com- 
 
 94 
 
A Builder of Prosperity 95 
 
 pany of Negroes, the Mutual Life Insurance Com 
 pany of Durham, North Carolina, bought $300,000 
 worth of Liberty Bonds, a Negro in Louisiana 
 bought $100,000 worth, a Negro farmer near Tus- 
 kegee, Alabama, who has made every cent of his 
 money out of his land, gave his check for $20,000 
 worth of bonds at one time, and the Negroes alto 
 gether put $225,000,000 into Liberty Bonds and 
 War Savings Stamps, besides giving great sums 
 to the Bed Cross. Was it not better for our gov 
 ernment and our cause and for every kind of busi 
 ness in America, that these people were no longer 
 the penniless slaves they had been sixty years 
 before ? 
 
 John Pierce was born in Greensboro, Alabama. 
 His father, a devout Christian, was a brick-layer 
 and a hard worker. His mother was a hard 
 worker, too, and a Christian whose daily living 
 impressed all who knew her. But despite hard 
 work, the family was very poor. Not only were 
 wages low, but there were ten children to feed and 
 clothe, all healthy and hungry and as busy as 
 only children can be in wearing out and outgrow 
 ing their clothes. It was a hard test, such pov 
 erty as theirs, yet they met it cheerfully and with 
 much love for one another. 
 
 Their main trouble lay in how to get an edu 
 cation. In those days few colored people were 
 prepared to teach, and in the long years of pov 
 erty in the South after the Civil War, there was 
 
96 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 very little money for schools for either white or 
 black people. The colored schools would have 
 been even poorer than they were, had the Negroes 
 themselves not made sacrifices, sometimes little 
 less than heroic, to eke out the school-money given 
 by the county. John s mother, hard as she strug 
 gled, took the teacher to board at half what she 
 was asked for board anywhere else, because she 
 felt that the mere presence of a better-educated 
 woman in the home would help her children to 
 better ways of speech and a better outlook on life. 
 
 As soon as he was old enough, John followed 
 the family tradition and went to work. By the 
 time he was ten, he was helping his father lay 
 bricks. Of course he had done other things be 
 fore then. He had been "totin chips " from the 
 woodpile to the kitchen ever since he could walk, 
 and ll chopping cotton " in the little family patch, 
 and picking it, too, from the time he was five or 
 six. From the white folks house to his mother s 
 tubs and big iron pot in the back yard, he could 
 carry on his head an amazing bundle of " wash- 
 in " all tied up in a sheet; and he could take it 
 back again, snowy white, still on his head, but 
 folded carefully in a big basket of splits. John 
 didn t mind the load, for he was proud to be 
 trusted and to help. 
 
 Even w r hen he was a little chap, he had friends 
 among the white people and earned many a wel 
 come nickel by running errands. His mother 
 
J ltoto l) U flu-Hue s Studio, Hampton, Ya. 
 JOHN B. PIERCE 
 
A Builder of Prosperity 97 
 
 taught her children to be honest and to work hon 
 estly, and for this reason people trusted them. 
 They were thrifty, too. When they would earn a 
 nickel or a dime, their mother taught them to save 
 it. As a result, when John Pierce went to Tuske- 
 gee, he had money saved, and it helped him to get 
 a start. 
 
 The same ambition that led his mother to take 
 the school-teacher to board, was largely responsi 
 ble for John s going to Tuskegee. Booker Wash 
 ington came to Greensboro once when John was 
 just a boy. His mother had heard something 
 about the man who was helping so many Negro 
 boys and girls, and she had him come and stay 
 at her house that she might find out more about 
 means of securing an education for her children. 
 Mr. Washington told her all about Tuskegee, 
 how boys and girls could work their way there 
 even if they had no money. That settled things. 
 John went to Tuskegee, and so did his sister 
 and several of his brothers. The first year he 
 was at school, his father died. He wanted to 
 go home at once and take charge of things, but 
 his mother would not hear of it. She told him to 
 stay where he was and to make the most of his 
 opportunity, that that was the best way to help 
 her, and that she and the younger children would 
 manage alone. 
 
 When John graduated, Mr. Washington recom 
 mended him as a teacher of brick-laying and other 
 
98 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 work at the Quaker school at High Point, North 
 Carolina, where he taught for two years. One 
 day he found on the ground some clay that would 
 make brick. He and his pupils dug it out, used 
 the excavation for a cellar, made the bricks, and 
 built a dormitory with student labor. 
 
 At that time it was while Cleveland was presi 
 dent there was great business depression in the 
 country. It was a very hard time for the Negroes. 
 Grown men worked all day for fifty cents or even 
 less ; tenants could not make anything out of their 
 cotton. They lived the year round on corn-pone 
 and bacon, and the farmers they worked for had 
 to advance them that. The cotton hardly paid 
 in the fall for their poor food. They were sunk 
 in a hopeless grind of drudgery, with not one 
 comfort in life. John Pierce was greatly trou 
 bled. He knew there was a better way; he had 
 seen it at Tuskegee. All those tenants could have 
 raised vegetables for the year round if they had 
 only known how, and they could have had chickens 
 and ducks and eggs and could have lived well. 
 And if they would learn how to do better farm 
 ing, they could raise bigger crops and have enough 
 even to sell some. Gradually they could live in 
 real homes instead of huts, and they could educate 
 their children and have money in the bank. He 
 wanted to show them how. 
 
 But he knew he had to learn more himself be 
 fore he could teach others. He had seen the farm- 
 
A Builder of Prosperity 99 
 
 ing at Tuskegee and knew what could be done; 
 but he had not learned farming, his work having 
 been in the trades. He had to know about analyz 
 ing the soil and building it up and rotating crops 
 and a lot of things an agriculturist should know. 
 
 He took what money he had saved and went 
 to Hampton. He partly worked his way there 
 and worked in summer on the school farm. For 
 three years he studied and finished all the post 
 graduate work in agriculture. Part of the time he 
 was assistant instructor in the Whittier School 
 gardens at Hampton, and after he graduated, he 
 was instructor in the normal agricultural work, 
 both in class and in the gardens for three years 
 more. The head of the State Relations Service 
 in Washington said his work was the best in 
 school gardens in the United States. 
 
 In the spring of 1906 Mr. Pierce began to do 
 the work he had been looking forward to. He 
 went out from Hampton on extension work to 
 near-by places school gardens and farm demon 
 strations. The government had no farm demon 
 stration work among Negroes then, but in the fall 
 the General Education Board offered to pay the 
 salaries of some Negro demonstration agents if 
 the Department would select the men and take 
 charge of their work. Mr. Pierce was made 
 county agent and later state agent for colored 
 work. 
 
 When he goes to a meeting which the county 
 
100 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 agent has worked up, the district agent goes with 
 him, and they have meetings for one or two or 
 three days. They talk over the school situation 
 and make plans to better it. They spray fruit 
 trees and potatoes, make the proper kind of sweet- 
 potato beds, test seeds and soils, and plant cotton 
 and corn and tobacco in demonstration fields, ex 
 plaining everything as they go. They test cattle 
 for tuberculosis and immunize hogs from cholera. 
 The farmers learn much better if they see the 
 things actually done as well as hear that they 
 should be done. They pull down a poor poultry 
 house or an insanitary toilet and build it back 
 again right. They show the people how to screen 
 their houses, how to keep their water-supply pure, 
 how to grow and store vegetables, how to grow 
 flowers and make things attractive. They do not 
 do all these things every time at every place, but 
 as many as they can each time. Sometimes the 
 people come from adjoining counties, and they all 
 bring their problems and ask questions. The 
 wives and children come too especially the boys. 
 Pig and corn clubs are started, in which the boys 
 and girls make their own money and save it for 
 schooling or to buy a little land. Often at these 
 demonstrations the boys put on a ball game in the 
 afternoon, and the girls of the canning clubs put 
 on contests and games. 
 
 In telling of these things, Mr. Pierce said: 
 "Yesterday I was over in a county where weVe 
 
A Builder of Prosperity 101 
 
 put on a special poultry campaign. We had about 
 a hundred people men, women, and children. We 
 pulled down and reconstructed a chicken house, 
 freed it of mites and the hens of lice, taught how 
 to breed for better stock, how to feed for eggs, 
 and how to keep eggs for winter. When the meet 
 ing was over, the women made lemonade, the boys 
 and girls put on games, and we all had a social 
 time. There ll be a new poultry record in that 
 county after this, better fare on the tables, and 
 more money for little comforts and conveniences 
 in the homes. " 
 
 When America entered the War, and it was 
 vital to speed up food production, Mr. Pierce was 
 put in charge of the colored work in eight states 
 Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, West Vir 
 ginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas. The 
 extension work the Government had been doing 
 for ten or twelve years was largely responsible for 
 the intelligence, loyalty, and efficiency with which 
 the Negroes responded to the country s call. It 
 was largely responsible, too, for the good relations 
 existing between the races. The white people see 
 how much better it is in every way and for every 
 one for the colored people to prosper, and they 
 aid the work wherever it is established. In speak 
 ing of his work, Mr. Pierce said, "I am just back 
 from a meeting in Henderson, Tennessee, pro 
 moted by the cashier of the white bank. We had 
 five hundred people out, a number of them white. 
 
102 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 We often have white people, especially the county 
 superintendent of education, and people of both 
 races talk. It cultivates a friendly feeling; and 
 the white people take an interest. Over in Hen 
 derson they re planning new buildings for our 
 schools. Out in Arkansas, in Elaine, where the 
 riots were, white people are employing colored 
 farm demonstration agents. There was a meet 
 ing in Little Kock, too, and the governor and the 
 secretary of state recognized the need of better 
 state colleges of agriculture. They said the 
 Negroes could count on having better provision 
 made for them." 
 
 The record of crop yields is an interesting com 
 mentary on John Pierce s life-work. Fifteen 
 years ago the average yield of corn in Virginia 
 was fifteen bushels per acre. Now it is forty 
 bushels, and in the last five years men have often 
 raised as high as seventy-five bushels per acre. 
 Cooperation is growing, too. The white farmers 
 are forming associations to market their crops 
 better, and they admit the colored farmers on 
 exactly the same terms as the white. That means 
 more money for all the people and more friend 
 liness, too. In Charlotte County the county asso 
 ciation has put a colored farmer on the executive 
 committee. The interracial committees also co 
 operate with the farmers. 
 
 The story of Wellville and Nottoway County, 
 John Pierce s home territory, is another example 
 
A Builder of Prosperity 103 
 
 of this man s ability and helpfulness to his coun 
 try. Wellville is just a village, with Blackstone 
 the nearest town. When Mr. Pierce went there in 
 1908 the schoolhouses were one-roomed log cabins ; 
 school ran five months; there were only " emer 
 gency " teachers in the whole county those who 
 have not even the lowest certificate. They each 
 received twenty-five dollars a month the five 
 months they taught. 
 
 The colored people bought some land and deeded 
 it to the school board. The white people gave 
 lumber, and the Negroes gave labor. They built a 
 good one-roomed school, painted it, and fitted it 
 out with patent desks. Such a school is now in 
 every colored community in the county, with teach 
 ers holding first or second grade certificates. 
 They run seven months of the year, and the teach 
 ers get fifty dollars a month. 
 
 Agricultural teaching and farm demonstration 
 work have gone on all over the county. Corn 
 production has risen from fifteen to seventy-five 
 bushels an acre, and other crops have increased in 
 the same way. The people put in " cover crops" 
 to build up and preserve the soil; and they have 
 vegetables the year round. 
 
 The houses used to be built of logs. Over sev 
 enty-five per cent of them have been rebuilt or 
 remodeled, and painted or whitewashed. They 
 all have sanitary outbuildings. Musical instru 
 ments are now in the homes, the people have better 
 
104 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 clothes, and they have money in the bank. The 
 church at Wellville was poor and there was no 
 way to baptize the people in it. It was remodeled, 
 a baptistery was put in, and church finances were 
 put on a business basis. The church is now used 
 as a community center. At first the pastors of 
 country churches thought it was not religious to 
 use a church to talk about community health or 
 to give community pleasure; but all that has 
 changed in Nottoway and in many other 
 counties, also. 
 
 Mr. Pierce s extension work was the beginning 
 of the County Training School at Blackstone. 
 "We can t claim credit for all of it," he said, 
 when asked about it. "We had co-operation 
 from colored and white people too." The 
 colored people raised a certain amount, and 
 the county board promised so much more. The 
 colored people agreed to employ at least five teach 
 ers, to have eight grades and an eight months 
 school, to have instruction in agriculture and home 
 industries, and an elementary course in the art of 
 teaching. As soon as possible, they were to add 
 at least two years of high school work. That is 
 the standard for a county training school; and 
 where it is met, the Slater Fund and the General 
 Education Board both cooperate with the county 
 board and bear part of the expense. There is a 
 fine school at Blackstone now, with seven or eight 
 teachers, and they will never lack for good teach- 
 
A Builder of Prosperity 105 
 
 ers in the county again. There are dormitories 
 for those who live too far away to go back and 
 forth, and land for school gardens and for pig and 
 poultry and farm demonstration work. 
 
 By this time Dr. Knapp, of the Department of 
 Agriculture at Washington, thought Mr. Pierce 
 had done enough for the people in Virginia and 
 wanted to get him down in the Gulf States. But 
 the white people rose up and refused to let him go. 
 
 "The white people are good friends to us here 
 in Virginia," said Mr. Pierce. "It is good for the 
 colored people to feel safe. In Blackstone a col 
 ored man committed a horrible crime. The city 
 officials feared a lynching and telegraphed the gov 
 ernor for troops, but the leading white men of 
 the town got together, telegraphed the governor 
 their pledge that the man should have a fair trial 
 and asked him to let them guard Blackstone s 
 good name. No troops were sent, and those white 
 men guarded the jail and the courtroom until the 
 trial was over and the prisoner lawfully executed. 
 It made the colored people feel they could get 
 justice there and a fair trial. They are buying 
 homes and putting their money in the banks. 
 
 "My own boys are getting a start already. 
 They go seven miles and back every day to school 
 at Blackstone. In addition they each cultivate a 
 piece of land and bank their money. This sum 
 mer they cut fifteen tons of hay from their land 
 and sold it for thirty dollars a ton." 
 
106 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 Looking at the quiet, kindly face, peaceful with 
 years of service, despite the many outward 
 struggles, one wondered if there have been any 
 very sharp inward struggles temptations and 
 difficulties that threatened to wreck his life. 
 
 "Why, of course, " he said slowly in response 
 to such a question. "Every one has temptations 
 enough to prove his mettle. There have been 
 those who would exploit the farmers, one way or 
 another, and I could have made a good deal of 
 money if I had agreed to help them in their 
 schemes. But I things like that never really 
 mattered. You see, for all our family our mother 
 has been well, just a clear light before us. It 
 was always so, and even the white people knew 
 it. When I was a little fellow at Greensboro, an 
 other colored boy set on me one day in the street. 
 I fought him off the best I could he was bigger 
 than I and a policeman came along and took us 
 both up to the city court. The judge sent the 
 other boy to jail and told me to run along home. 
 He said he knew my mother, and he knew how she 
 raised her children. She was just like that." 
 
 "Did she live long enough to know anything 
 about this work you are doing now?" he was 
 asked. 
 
 His whole face lighted up. "Why, she s living 
 now, down in Greensboro! I see her every now 
 and then. All her children want her to live with 
 them we can all take good care of her; but she 
 
A Builder of Prosperity 107 
 
 likes to stay on in the old home. So we all take 
 care of her there and see her when we can. She 
 knows all about my work. 
 
 Thinking of one s own home and of those in it 
 who have grown to manhood and womanhood, one 
 knows that the highest honor which can come 
 to any woman is that she should be "a clear light 
 before her children. Ignorant, this poor woman 
 may have been, struggling on in grinding poverty 
 through years of hardest work, but measured by 
 God s standards, which are the only real ones, 
 tliis colored mother had attained. 
 
VIII 
 A WOMAN BANKER 
 
 ON a corner just a block from Broad Street, 
 in Eiclunond, Virginia, stands a handsome 
 three-story building of brick and stone 
 which bears a tablet with the legend, "St. Luke s 
 Penny Savings Bank. Established 1902. " This 
 is said to be the first bank in the country founded 
 by a woman, and it is still one of the very few 
 that have a woman president the only bank 
 founded or run by a colored woman. 
 
 St. Luke s Bank started with $25,000 of paid-up 
 capital. This was afterwards increased to 
 $50,000; and it has a surplus of $25,000 more. It 
 has paid its stockholders a five per cent dividend 
 steadily, regardless of panics and hard times ; and 
 once, during a severe money stringency, when the 
 white banks of Richmond were unable to extend 
 further loans to the city, this colored woman 
 banker lent the city $100,000 in cash to carry 
 on the public schools for both the white and black 
 races. 
 
 How did the daughter of a colored laundress 
 and one-time slave come to start a bank and guide 
 it to success through twenty-one years filled with 
 other important work? Something went before it, 
 
 108 
 
A Woman Banker 109 
 
 of course; not merely unusual ability, which she 
 plainly has, but long, hard, faithful work in help 
 ing the poorer members of her race to win through 
 in times of adversity and to get on their feet. 
 
 Mrs. Maggie L. Walker was born in Richmond. 
 Her mother was Elizabeth Mitchell a woman 
 born a slave and unable to make a living for her 
 self and her little girl except at the washtub. But 
 what she could do, she did well, and her own lack 
 of opportunity fixed in her the determination that 
 her child should have a chance. What this deter 
 mination cost the mother in toil and sacrifice one 
 may not know, washing was not a lucrative 
 profession in those days in the South. But 
 mother and daughter took their hardships cheer 
 fully, and the girl did her best to lighten her 
 mother s load so far as she could. When she was 
 eighteen, she graduated from high school, and 
 that fall became a teacher in one of the public 
 schools. From that time to the present, one of 
 her main purposes in life has been to make life 
 easier for the mother to whose sacrifices she owes 
 her first start toward better things. 
 
 Mrs. Walker was married when she was twenty 
 and went into the business of home-making with 
 the same joyful and energetic efficiency which 
 had marked her work as a teacher. Her husband, 
 a skilled workman, prospered, and with his wife s 
 good management, they and their two little sons 
 lived in comfort and began to prosper. 
 
110 In tlie Vanguard of a Race 
 
 As the boys grew older and went to school, the 
 mother found herself growing restless. She was 
 well and strong, her home work was thoroughly 
 organized and went like clock-work, her husband 
 and the boys were away most of the day, and 
 although her church work had grown considerably, 
 she still had time on her hands for more work. 
 "I felt like a spendthrift," she said, in speaking 
 of this time. "I knew I had the energy to do a 
 lot of things for my people that needed doing, and 
 I felt I ought to be about it some way. Yet I 
 didn t know what I could do or where to begin. 
 I was restless and wanted work that was of some 
 account. 
 
 Then her opportunity came such a tiny one, 
 apparently, that one could hardly have blamed 
 her, had she refused it. But she had made it 
 the rule of her life to do what she could with 
 whatever came to her hand. That was one of the 
 valuable lessons she learned from her mother, the 
 laundress. 
 
 There was a little benefit society in Richmond- 
 one of probably a dozen or two such. They are 
 pathetically popular among Negroes, to whom 
 sickness is a catastrophe such as only the poorest 
 people can fully comprehend. This particular so 
 ciety was the Independent Order of St. Luke. It 
 collected small weekly dues from its members, of 
 whom at that time it had a thousand. If they 
 fell ill, it paid them a certain sum weekly. If they 
 
A Woman Banker 111 
 
 died, a death benefit was paid which provided for 
 the funeral expenses, thus saving the family from 
 what is often, among the very poor, a crushing 
 burden of debt. 
 
 Mrs. Walker was offered the secretaryship of 
 this society at the munificent salary of eight dol 
 lars a month. She was to collect dues, verify cases 
 of illness and of death, keep the books, and pay 
 out all sums due. 
 
 She accepted the opportunity at once. The 
 Order might be a small one for an Order, but 
 looking after a thousand members did seem a job 
 to keep one busy, and it certainly helped the 
 people it reached. As soon as she had the 
 work at her fingers ends, however, she began 
 reaching out. If the Order helped a thousand, 
 why shouldn t it help twenty thousand fifty a 
 hundred thousand? Why should it confine itself 
 to giving help in trouble? Why couldn t it train 
 people to help themselves in time of health to 
 save, to invest, to win their way to economic in 
 dependence? Why couldn t it get hold of the 
 children and teach them thrift, build up self-con 
 trol and forethought in their careless little souls, 
 and start them on the path to success before they 
 should form habits of self-indulgence and waste? 
 Why, it could do all that! And it should, and it 
 would. So it has done and still does to-day. 
 
 There are now a hundred thousand members 
 of the Order in twenty-one states, seventy-five 
 
112 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 thousand of whom have held their membership 
 long enough to be entitled to benefits if they be 
 come ill or die. Five dollars a week is paid in 
 case of sickness; and from one hundred to five 
 hundred dollars, according to the amount of dues 
 paid, in case of death. There is over $70,000 cash 
 in the emergency fund a fund that didn t exist 
 when Mrs. Walker took charge. A hundred and 
 forty field workers are employed, and forty-five 
 clerks are in the home office. The assets of the 
 Order amount to $360,000. A handsome office 
 building has been put up at 900-904 St. James 
 Street, Richmond, costing $100,000. It provides 
 ample office space for the work of the Order, a 
 large auditorium, a number of rooms for club and 
 lodge meetings, a large supply department where 
 the badges, regalia, account books, and so forth, 
 of the Order are manufactured and sent out, and 
 a complete printing establishment with two lino 
 type machines. Here the St. Luke s Herald, an 
 other of Mrs. Walker s enterprises, is printed and 
 goes out to its big constituency. It gives full re 
 ports of the Order s business, stories of members, 
 both children and adults, who are getting ahead | 
 financially or doing anything else worth while, j 
 suggestions for meetings, and sound teaching in : 
 regard to health, thrift, morals, and education. 
 It goes to city and country, to educated and igno 
 rant. To scores of thousands of unprivileged 
 Negroes it is giving inspiration and a horizon. 
 
A Woman Banker 113 
 
 It was because of all this rapidly extending 
 work that Mrs. Walker felt the need of a bank. 
 In 1902 she started one and built a home for it a 
 few blocks away from the headquarters building. 
 In 1920 this bank had nearly six thousand deposi 
 tors and resources of over half a million dollars. 
 
 This does not, however, nearly represent the 
 thrift work of St. Luke s. Over fifteen thousand 
 children who are members, scattered through 
 many states, meet weekly with a regular program 
 which includes Bible instruction and lessons in 
 thrift and in hygiene. Each child is given a card 
 board "rainy-day bank 7 ; as soon as he has a 
 dollar, the leader encourages him to put it in a 
 regular savings bank just as is done with adult 
 members. These savings, for the most part, find 
 their way to local white banks, the Richmond in 
 stitution serving only adjacent territory. 
 
 "When any of our girls is advanced to making 
 as much as fifty dollars a month," said Mrs. 
 Walker, "we begin to persuade them to buy a 
 home. As soon as they save enough for the first 
 payment, the bank will help them out. There is 
 a woman in the office here who came to us eighteen 
 years ago. She did odd jobs of cleaning, and 
 we paid her a dollar a week, which she was glad 
 to get. But we encouraged her to fit herself for 
 better things. She studied, took a business course 
 at night-school, and has worked her way up until 
 now she is our head bookkeeper, with a salary of 
 
114 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 one hundred and fifty dollars a month. She owns 
 a nice home, well furnished and fully paid for, and 
 has money in the bank. 
 
 Then there was that one-legged little bootblack 
 at Second and Clay streets. He joined our Order. 
 He had a rented chair out on the sidewalk in the 
 weather. We helped him save, and when he had 
 fifty dollars, we helped him rent a little place with 
 three chairs. That was seven years ago. Now he 
 has a place of his own with twelve chairs. He 
 has bought a home for his mother paid $1,900 for 
 it and has it furnished and free of debt. And 
 his bank account never falls below five hundred 
 dollars. 
 
 "Numbers of our children have bank accounts 
 of from one hundred to four hundred dollars. 
 They sell papers, cut grass, do chores, run er 
 rands, work in stores Saturdays. We teach them 
 to save with the definite purpose of wise use of 
 the money. We try to give them a sense of moral 
 responsibility for its wise use. Of course we 
 can t do that without religious teaching. We teach 
 them the Lord s Prayer and the Ten Command 
 ments, the words of Christ, and some of the 
 Psalms. We try to connect these things with 
 every-day living and to show them that part of 
 their duty in becoming independent is getting 
 where they can help others. 
 
 "We do a good deal of the same kind of work 
 with the grown people. Our bank lends money 
 
A Woman Banker 115 
 
 for home-building at six per cent, and we tide 
 the deserving ones over times of trouble. Six hun 
 dred and forty-five homes have been entirely paid 
 for through our bank s help." 
 
 All this really does look like work enough for 
 one woman, with the travel it involves through 
 nearly half the states of the Union, the constant 
 speaking, writing, and oversight of so many ac 
 tivities. 
 
 Besides these business interests there is Mrs, 
 Walker s church work, which includes her local 
 church and Sunday-school, and her position as one 
 of the trustees of the Woman s Auxiliary of the 
 National Baptist Convention. 
 
 But Mrs. Walker s social service work is enough 
 for a story in itself. Through her club affiliations, 
 she became deeply interested in Mrs. Barrett s 
 school at Peake. She organized in Richmond a 
 Council of Women with fourteen hundred mem 
 bers, which did yeoman service in raising the first 
 five thousand dollars to buy the farm at Peake 
 and has ever since given liberally to all the needs 
 of the school. Mrs. Walker is one of the colored 
 members of the school s bi-racial board of trust. 
 As a result of this work for Peake came the com 
 munity work in Richmond. 
 
 "The white women of Richmond began it," she 
 said. "You know what some of them have done 
 here women who stand at the top socially and 
 who are leaders in the church and the club life of 
 
116 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 the city and state. They had done fine community 
 work for white people, and at length they went to 
 our preachers and asked them to invite their lead 
 ing women to a conference. As a result, we began 
 some forms of community work. Then a white 
 philanthropist who gave the white women a house 
 for a working girls home said that if we colored 
 women would show our interest in social work 
 among our people by raising a thousand dollars 
 for it, he would give us the use of a large house, 
 and if we made good, he would deed it to a board 
 of white and colored women for colored work. 
 
 "You know we had to make good after that. 
 "We raised the thousand dollars, and we have kept 
 right on. The house has been deeded now to our 
 bi-racial board. The white women don t work for 
 us, they work with us; and they ve helped us to 
 connect up with every charitable organization in 
 the city. We have four paid workers, and the 
 Community House is just such a center of in 
 fluence as we have needed all these years." 
 
 Of Mrs. Walker s interest in this work, her 
 grasp of the problems it touches, and her will 
 ingness to spend and be spent in it, the white 
 women of the joint board speak with high praise. 
 Here, as at Peake, and as a trustee of Miss Bur 
 roughs school at Washington, she shows her con 
 cern especially for the young womanhood of her 
 race. 
 
 When Mrs. Walker, who is a literal believer in 
 
A Woman Banker 117 
 
 the injunction to keep one hand in ignorance of 
 what the other does, told Miss Burroughs that 
 she ought not to have put her name over the build 
 ing she gave to the National Training School, Miss 
 Burroughs replied, 
 
 " You ought not to feel that way. It helps those 
 girls there struggling for an education to know 
 that a successful woman like you cares about 
 them; and the thought of your success is an in 
 spiration to them to try harder to succeed, them 
 selves. And better than all, it s an object-lesson 
 to teach them that the finest use of success is to 
 serve others." 
 
 When asked about the new laundry at the Wash 
 ington school and the ten thousand dollars Miss 
 Burroughs so urgently needed for it soon, the 
 banker trustee said placidly : 
 
 " She 11 get it. She always does. Nannie Bur 
 roughs sits down there in her office when she wants 
 some money and writes off a letter. Then she 
 mimeographs it and sends it to our people all over 
 the country. If you read the first line, you finish 
 it ; and by the time you finish it, your money is as 
 good as out of your pocket into hers. There s 
 nothing to do but to send her w r hat she asks for. 
 Don t you worry about that laundry; it s all right, 
 and she is too." 
 
 One can but be impressed with the way Mrs. 
 Walker, Mrs. Barrett, and Mrs. Burroughs work 
 together. Their personalities are markedly differ- 
 
118 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 ent, their gifts differ, their calls to service lead 
 them along divergent lines. Yet each is among 
 the most notable present-day women of their race ; 
 and their friendship and cooperation, their hearty 
 faith in one another s work, the absence of petty 
 self-consciousness and the rivalry which springs 
 from it are beautiful to see. 
 
 Mrs. Walker s two sons, grown men now, are 
 closely associated with her in her business. They 
 talk things over together; and sometimes, when a 
 decision in some matter is hard to come by, the 
 boys discuss it between themselves. Such talks 
 are liable to end with : 
 
 "Has Mother been praying over this thing?" 
 
 "Why, of course she has." 
 
 "Well, there s no need to worry then. I notice 
 when Mother prays things do straighten out." 
 
 That is really the secret of all these women s 
 power. They are all women of unusual endow 
 ment; but they are also women of faith and 
 prayer. 
 
IX 
 "A COMPOSER BY DIVINE RIGHT" 
 
 IF Harry Burleigh s musical gift had been less 
 genuine, it might have been smothered out by 
 the difficulties of his life, for this composer- 
 to-be was born and reared in deep poverty, with 
 the added handicap of Negro blood. 
 
 In that blood, however, there was a strain of 
 courage and determination the boy might well be 
 proud of. His grandfather, Hamilton Waters, 
 was an escaped slave who became blind as a result 
 of the hardships which he endured. Yet blind, he 
 worked on down to a ripe old age, supporting him 
 self and aiding as far as he could his children. 
 
 His daughter Elizabeth, Harry s mother, was 
 born near Lansing, Mich., in a wagon in which 
 her parents were trying to make their way into 
 Canada. Perhaps it was her baby needs which 
 changed their plans for they did not cross the 
 border, but turned aside and settled in Erie, Penn 
 sylvania. Here the blind father set himself to 
 provide for his family. 
 
 Whether through independence or through 
 friendlessness perhaps through both the father 
 set up in business for himself as a presser of 
 men s clothing. For this, he needed only an iron 
 
 119 
 
120 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 and a board and the wise touch of fingers which 
 serve the blind for eyes. He brought character to 
 his work and the will to succeed. 
 
 For many years Harry s grandfather was also 
 the town crier, a position not to be obtained now 
 adays when an extra paper is printed at any hour 
 of the day that anything unusual happens. In 
 those days, newspapers, even the biggest of them, 
 were printed but once a day, and those issued in 
 small places, but once a week. If anybody died, 
 the town crier went through the streets ringing 
 his bell and telling the hour of the funeral. If an 
 important meeting was to be held, he told that. 
 He carried the news of any outside happening that 
 was of importance to the community or to the 
 world at large. But it was hard work tramping 
 the streets in all weathers, and did not bring in 
 very much money. Yet by the time the baby born 
 in the wagon had grown up and finished high 
 school, her father was able, by what sharp self- 
 denial one can guess, to send her to college. She 
 graduated, only to find that no place was open to 
 her to do the work for which she had fitted her 
 self. The Civil War was not yet over, and neither 
 North nor South had any place for educated col 
 ored people. She married later and had five chil 
 dren. One, born in 1866, was christened Henry 
 Thacker and grew up to become known as Harry 
 T. Burleigh, singer and composer. 
 
 While he was still a little fellow, Harry s father 
 
"A Composer by Divine Right" 121 
 
 died, and his mother had to go out from her home 
 to win bread for her children. She took the only 
 kind of work open to her and became janitress of 
 a public school. It was poorly paid work, and it 
 was all she and her father could do to keep the 
 wolf from the door. As soon as they could, the 
 children worked too. From the time he was big 
 enough to do anything at all, Harry sold papers 
 and ran errands and did any odd chores he could 
 find to do. Later he was employed as a lamp 
 lighter. Boys and girls of to-day are used to the 
 flashing on of electricity in a moment, but not so 
 very many years ago oil lamps lighted the smaller 
 cities, and even New York and London were 
 lighted at night by dim gaslights. As each lamp 
 had to be lighted by hand, quite an army of boys 
 and men found employment in lighting them at 
 dusk and turning them out at dawn. 
 
 During these years, the boy was going co public 
 school. Children, then as now, were taught sing 
 ing in school, and here it was discovered that 
 Harry had quite a wonderful voice. His teachers 
 took great pains with him. The gift which God 
 had given him began to grow and blossom until 
 a passionate love for music filled his soul. 
 
 His mother, like her son, was eager to do any 
 extra work which would bring more money to the 
 family purse; and being both intelligent and 
 highly trained, she was in demand to help in serv 
 ing at large entertainments in the homes of 
 
122 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 wealthy people of Erie. In this capacity she was 
 frequently employed by a lady who brought to her 
 home for the entertainment of her friends many 
 distinguished musical artists. Harry s mother 
 would tell the boy when a recital was to be given, 
 and he would stand outside, often in bitter cold 
 weather, in the hope of hearing some of the mas 
 ters of the art he so loved. One day his mother 
 told him that the great Joseffy was coming. That 
 night he stood outside the windows of Mrs. Kus- 
 selPs home, the snow up to his knees, drinking 
 in the great artist s magic. He barely escaped 
 pneumonia as a result of this experience. To pre 
 vent the repetition of such an illness, his mother 
 told her employer the story; and after that, when 
 Mrs. Kussell gave a concert for her friends, 
 Harry was inside, opening the door to guests. 
 
 Mme. Carreno was one of the artists whom 
 he heard in this way, and with her at Mrs. 
 Eussell s home was Mrs. MacDowell, the mother 
 of the American composer. Harry saw and re 
 membered Mrs. MacDowell, and years afterward 
 she played an important part in his life. 
 
 Through his school singing the boy s voice be 
 came known to a number of people. From the 
 time he was sixteen, he sang in church choirs in 
 Erie on Sunday and in the Jewish synagogue on 
 Saturday. He went to school until he was twenty, 
 always working hard outside of school hours and 
 in vacation. In summer, as he grew older, he 
 
"A Composer by Divine Bight" 123 
 
 worked on the big lake steamers. But all the 
 money he could earn was far from enough for 
 what he wanted, and the desire of his heart seemed 
 destined to remain a dream. He studied stenog 
 raphy and worked at that until he was twenty- six 
 years old. 
 
 Then he heard that the National Conservatory 
 of Music in New York City had, through its pres 
 ident, Mrs. Jeannette M. Thurber, offered some 
 scholarships, and he decided to try for one of 
 them. He came to New York and sang before a 
 committee of judges, Joseffy himself being one. 
 There was some question of his winning a schol 
 arship, but when he sought out the registrar of 
 the conservatory, he recognized her as Mrs. Mac- 
 Dowell and gave her a letter of recommendation 
 which Mrs. Eussell had written for him. She 
 turned the scale in his favor and during his four 
 years of study was his unfailing friend. She gave 
 him clerical work in her office and helped him in 
 every way she could. 
 
 Dvorak, greatest of Bohemian composers, was 
 the director of the conservatory, the faculty of 
 which was composed of famous men. Dvorak was 
 interested in the eager student and gave him much 
 of his time outside of class hours. Burleigh copied 
 many of his orchestral compositions for him. He 
 also played and sang for Dvorak the old Negro 
 " spirituals. These weird and beautiful melo 
 dies made a deep impression on the great com- 
 
124 In the Vanguard of a Eace 
 
 poser, who wove one of them into one of his 
 greatest compositions, the "New World Sym 
 phony. 
 
 Burleigh studied hard during these four years, 
 developing his splendid voice and learning har 
 mony and counterpoint under men who were real 
 masters. But always there was the struggle for 
 daily bread. His scholarship covered only his tui 
 tion. Odd jobs and chores were still necessities 
 to supply food and clothes. His mother, firm in 
 her belief in her boy s great gifts, found ways to 
 help him out, as mothers will. What he could not 
 have, he did without, and there was no complaint 
 or self-pity. The first summer after he came to 
 New York, he went to Saratoga and worked in a 
 hotel; but by the next summer his voice was be 
 coming known, and he went again to Saratoga for 
 the vacation months, this time as baritone soloist 
 in an Episcopal church. The worst was now be 
 hind him. Since that time, while he has worked 
 hard, he has been doing work he loves and is 
 fitted for. Later years have brought him the re 
 wards of work well done. His early struggles and 
 privations have left not the slightest touch of 
 bitterness on his spirit. He went through them 
 all and conquered them with that best of all cour 
 age which carries good cheer high, like a guidon. 
 
 In 1894, when the position of baritone soloist 
 became vacant in St. George s Episcopal Church 
 in New York, one of the largest churches in the 
 
"A. Composer "by Divine Right" 125 
 
 city, Mr. Burleigh applied for the position. He 
 was the only Negro among the sixty applicants, 
 but he had the voice wanted, and Dr. Kainsford, 
 the rector, and the vestrymen did not think the 
 color of his skin should rule him out of serving 
 with it in God s house. For twenty-eight years 
 he has remained a member of this choir. For 
 twenty-two years he has sung also in Temple 
 Emanu-El, one of the largest synagogues of the 
 city. 
 
 Burleigh s voice became known far and wide, 
 and work crowded in upon him. He undertook 
 the training of choirs in a number of churches 
 in New York and its vicinity, doing the work with 
 such modest courtesy and yet with such ability 
 and success that each effort added to his reputa 
 tion. His voice was beautiful, rich, full, and musi 
 cal to the last vibration, and it had been splen 
 didly trained. He was soon in demand at con 
 certs and at private musicales. Several European 
 tours were arranged for him, and for years his 
 annual vacations were spent abroad, where he 
 sang in England and on the continent with great 
 and increasing success. He sang for King Ed 
 ward VII, who greatly admired his voice, and for 
 many of the other crowned heads of Europe. But 
 the real test of his ability was the power of his 
 voice to move all kinds of people in the mixed 
 audiences of great cities. Measured by that stand 
 ard, he sang greatly. 
 
126 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 It is as a singer that lie classifies himself. "A 
 composer ?" he says, when his musical works are 
 spoken of. "Oh, no. Just a few songs I ve done, 
 and practically no orchestration. My life has been 
 spent as a singer is spent that way now. I can 
 not lay claim to the name of composer." 
 
 But many musicians of rank disagree with him. 
 He has composed the music for about a hundred 
 songs and several festival anthems for choruses, 
 and he has written the scores for a volume of 
 Negro "spirituals" which are not the least of his 
 achievements. 
 
 These old Negro melodies were sung, as all 
 Southern people know, by groups of slaves and 
 were without any instrumental accompaniment. 
 So sung, by hundreds of voices, their beauty 
 fills the heart and makes words difficult. One 
 feels them, and in them the faith and aspira 
 tion of a race. They may be heard in perfec 
 tion at Hampton, Tuskegee, and Fisk Univer 
 sity, and at many of the Negro schools of the 
 South. But except for the occasional tours of 
 some small group of Negro singers in the North, 
 until recently they were seldom heard outside the 
 Southern states. Yet some of the world s leading 
 musicians and composers agree that these melo 
 dies are America s most distinctive gift to the 
 music of the world. For a long time Southern 
 people thought lightly of this treasure. Many of 
 them regarded Negro songs as a joke, and laughed 
 
"A Composer by Divine Bight" 127 
 
 over them until the Negroes themselves grew half 
 ashamed of their wonderful melodies and tried 
 above everything to "sing like white folks." 
 
 But with time came a broader view of the unique 
 place of Negro music in the world of art. Among 
 white people, those who laughed were silenced by 
 those whose hearts had always been moved by the 
 weird and haunting melody of Negro songs. Be 
 fore they dropped into oblivion, white and Negro 
 scholars and musicians began to collect them and 
 teach them to the rising generation. Mr. Bur 
 leigh s contribution to this movement, of such 
 value to America and the world, has been the set 
 ting of the v old melodies to a musical accompani 
 ment so that they may be sung anywhere, by any 
 singer, just as other songs are sung. 
 
 It was, owing to the very nature of the music, 
 a most difficult thing to do, and perhaps no man 
 not a Negro, however gifted, would have dared to 
 attempt it. But Mr. Burleigh has done it su 
 premely well. "Each composition, " says a musi 
 cal authority, "is a classic in itself. " Their suc 
 cess is attested by the famous singers who to-day 
 use Burleigh s settings of the "spirituals." 
 Perhaps the most famous of this well-known 
 group of songs is "Deep River"; but it is hard to 
 select where all are of merit. 
 
 One of Burleigh s finest pieces of work, accord 
 ing to musical critics, is "Ethiopia Saluting the 
 Colors," a setting of Walt Whitman s poem. An- 
 
128 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 other noted song is his setting of Eupert Brooke s 
 sonnet, "The Soldier." "Jean" has been sung 
 by thousands of people here and abroad, and also 
 "The Young Warrior," a wonderful setting of 
 the war song of a Negro poet, James Weldon 
 Johnson. The words themselves are noble: 
 
 Mother, shed no mournful tears, 
 
 But gird me on my sword ; 
 And give no utterance to thy fears, 
 
 But bless me with thy word. 
 
 Now let thine eyes my way pursue 
 
 Where er my footsteps fare; 
 And when they lead beyond thy view 
 
 Send after me a prayer. 
 
 Still, pray not to defend from harm, 
 
 Nor danger to dispel; 
 But rather, that with steadfast arm 
 
 I fight the battle well. 
 
 Pray that I keep, through all the days, 
 My heart and purpose strong, 
 
 My sword unsullied, and always 
 Unsheathed against the wrong. 
 
 The lines are drawn, the fight is on, 
 
 A cause is to be won ; 
 Mother, look not so white and wan : 
 
 Give Godspeed to thy son. 
 
 The music stirs the blood. There is in it a 
 very passion of patriotic fervor and sacrifice. 
 That it was sung all over America and France 
 by our Negro troops is no wonder. It swept Italy 
 like a flame ; the soldiers of the Italian army sang 
 
Photo by Hishkitij New York 
 
 HARRY T. BURLEIGH 
 
"A Composer ~by Divine Right" 129 
 
 it on the battlefield, and their people sang it at 
 home. Zandonai, a notable Italian composer, 
 wrote an orchestration for it, that the song might 
 pour from thousands of throats with the full 
 power of the instruments behind it. One musical 
 critic has said that it is "one of the few really 
 admirable songs America has produced in recent 
 years." 
 
 One of Mr. Burleigh s greatest successes has 
 been his music for a song by Walter Brown, 
 " Little Mother of Mine." John McCormack sang 
 this with tremendous effect in the New York Hip 
 podrome before "the largest audience ever seen 
 in America s largest playhouse." A thousand 
 people sat on the stage behind the singer for want 
 of room in the house. At the close of the song 
 the audience rose in an ovation, and McCormack 
 insisted that Burleigh, who sat near him, should 
 go forward with him to acknowledge the applause. 
 
 "You went, of course," he was asked. 
 
 He shook his head. "I couldn t. I couldn t. 
 But he sang it wonderfully." 
 
 The songs are not all. There are "Southland 
 Sketches," four compositions for the violin which 
 have won high praise ; and orchestrations for some 
 of the songs arranged as choruses. The "Five 
 Songs of Laurence Hope" are counted among his 
 best work. 
 
 Harry Burleigh is still a singer with a voice 
 which is a joy to hear. But he is a composer, too; 
 
130 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 those who know his work agree with Kramer, who 
 calls him "a composer by divine right. " Con 
 cerning this, his publisher has also a word to say. 
 
 "He has done remarkable things, " said he; 
 "things which would have been remarkable in 
 a man who began with everything in his favor and 
 had no such fight to make as Burleigh had. But 
 he has so much more in him. If only some one 
 had had the vision, in Burleigh s youth, to set him 
 free from that long struggle for mere existence 
 and make it possible for him to spend his strength 
 in the work he was made for, he would rank with 
 MacDowell himself. One must have time for sym 
 phonies, months and years ; and they bring in no 
 ready money. America, and the whole world of 
 art, is the poorer because Burleigh had to fight for 
 his daily bread so long." 
 
 But Burleigh himself only smiles at this. "I 
 had my living to make," he says. "I am like 
 other people, I must do the best I can with what 
 I have and not cry for what I can t get." 
 
 He is the musical editor for the American 
 branch of the Eicordi house. No piece of music 
 is submitted to them which does not pass through 
 his hands and rest its fate on his judgment. But 
 with all his success as a singer, composer, and 
 judge of music, Harry Burleigh is as modest, as 
 simple, as unspoiled as the boy who stood knee- 
 deep in snow to catch a strain of the music he so 
 loved. 
 
A LIGHT IN A DARK PLACE 
 
 MARTHA DRUMMER was born in a little 
 Georgia town. Her people were very 
 poor, and her father s death left the fam 
 ily an added burden of poverty. She had two 
 sisters, and while they were still small, their 
 mother moved to Griffin, a larger town, where 
 there was a better school. For poor and igno 
 rant though she was, this colored mother planned 
 the best her love could compass for her girls, love 
 and the spirit of sacrifice being God s common 
 gifts to the mothers of all the world. She worked 
 and pinched to keep her girls in the public school, 
 and of course they helped by working in vacation, 
 even when they were little. 
 
 Martha finished the sixth grade no small 
 achievement under the circumstances. Then, she 
 " hired out," as is said in the South, to white 
 folks, and began at the age of twelve or thirteen 
 to support herself. 
 
 But two things had happened to her: meager 
 though it was, her schooling had awakened a 
 bright mind, and she was athirst for an education ; 
 and her soul had wakened too, so that she wanted 
 the education as a means of better service to God 
 
 131 
 
132 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 and her fellows. It seemed like wanting the rain 
 bow, but she wanted it, and the Lord knew how 
 great her desire was. 
 
 There were schools in the South for just such 
 girls as Martha. The Southern white people 
 hardly realize yet what the schools for Negroes 
 opened in the South by the Northern churches 
 after the war have done for the development both 
 of the Negroes and the South. There were bitter 
 years in which both races lost their old trust in one 
 another ; and a time of such poverty that adequate 
 schools for white children were impossible, and 
 little was done for Negroes. If the Northern 
 Christians had not stood in the breach, bringing 
 opportunity to gifted Negroes and a chance to 
 many more of fair ability, the race would have 
 been leaderless during most critical times, a prey 
 to every evil influence. What would be the rela 
 tions of the races to-day without the lives and 
 influence of men like Booker Washington, Dr. 
 Moton, Isaac Fisher, George Haynes, Bishop 
 Clinton, John Hope, Bishop Jones, Archdeacon 
 Russell, John Gandy, and scores and scores more 
 ministers, teachers, doctors, business men, who 
 have taught their people higher ways of living for 
 mind and body and soul! 
 
 The South is spending thousands of dollars now 
 where it scarcely spent hundreds in the lean years 
 for Negro education. But for many years there 
 were no Negro teachers worthy the name except 
 
A Light in a Dark Place 133 
 
 those trained by the Northern churches. They 
 sent out such women as Miss Lucy Laney, Miss 
 Georgia Washington, Mrs. Julia Harris, Mrs, 
 Charlotte Brown, Mrs. Washington one is per 
 plexed about naming any of so great a company 
 because of the many who must be omitted. All 
 over the South these women have built character 
 and industry and Christian service, a blessing to 
 white and black alike. 
 
 There was a school, therefore, for Martha 
 Drummer. Dr. Thirkield, who is now Bishop 
 Thirkield, was at that time in charge of the theo 
 logical department of Clark University. At one 
 time when he visited Griffin to preach to the Ne 
 groes, Martha s pastor told him about her. Dr. 
 Thirkield went to see her and was impressed, as 
 the pastor had been, by her unusual promise. 
 Maybe the twinkle in her eyes helped, for, as good 
 judges of human nature know, a keen sense of 
 kindly fun and humor is a pretty good indication 
 of brains and force, and Martha s eyes have twin 
 kled all her life. Dr. Thirkield secured a tuition 
 scholarship for her, and she went to Atlanta to 
 enter the preparatory school at Clark. 
 
 The first year, she worked for a family who 
 gave her time during school hours to attend her 
 classes ; but she needed more time for study. She 
 so clearly showed her worth that the second year 
 a way was made for her to live at the girls dor 
 mitory. She worked on Saturdays and taught 
 
134 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 school in vacation. By hard economy, she event 
 ually graduated from Clark. 
 
 One of her teachers relates that when she first 
 entered the dormitory, she would cause outbreaks 
 of laughter during study hour by her comical 
 " asides" on the lessons. But her teacher soon, 
 found that what she said was not only funny, 
 but that it set the girls to thinking, so that she 
 always had better lessons from them the days 
 after Martha had bubbled over. 
 
 Her sense of humor sometimes helped her 
 to shrewd decisions in a tight place. One sum 
 mer she had in her vacation school seven or eight 
 children from one family. In those days the 
 county schools had very short terms, which the 
 colored parents lengthened by paying the teacher 
 themselves by the week or month after the public 
 term was over. When Martha called on the 
 mother of this numerous brood for her first pay 
 ment, she was told that in that family school bills 
 were always paid in a lump at the end of the 
 term, and knowing the woman to be prosperous, 
 well able to pay the money all at once, she 
 waited. But at the end of the term she was calmly 
 told that her patron had no money at all and could 
 not pay a cent. Martha knew this was not true. 
 She also knew that she had earned her money, and 
 that she had to have it. So she borrowed a horse 
 and wagon and a rope and drove out to the 
 woman s home. Her eyes must have danced on 
 
A Light in a Dark Place 135 
 
 the way, though she looked as solemn as possible 
 when she arrived. The woman was more than 
 solemn, she "was plumb worried to death," she 
 said, "but she didn t have nary a cent to pay 
 not one." 
 
 "Never mind," said Martha kindly, "some of 
 your farm products will do. I would just as soon 
 have a couple of pigs. I m sure I can sell them, 
 and don t you worry another minute." 
 
 The pigs were all over the yard, so the woman 
 could not possibly say she didn t have "nary 
 a pig." Martha caught two, got them into the 
 wagon and tied them, the woman looking on, petri 
 fied. Martha bade her a cheerful good-evening 
 and started off; but before she got to the big 
 road, the woman came to life. She couldn t lose 
 all that bacon and sausage, to say nothing of hams 
 and "chitlin s"! She found a purse or an old 
 stocking in no time and ran after the teacher hot 
 foot. They had a pleasant chat down by the gate. 
 The pigs went home with their mistress, while 
 Martha went home, her eyes dancing more than 
 ever, with her hard-earned money in her pocket. 
 
 She wanted to be a foreign missionary. There 
 was need at home, she knew, but out in Africa 
 were millions who had never heard of a God 
 of love; millions who knew no comfort of body 
 or mind or soul. Whoever helped them must 
 give up home and friends and comfort. When one 
 really sees the need, things which to most people 
 
136 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 seem essential do not matter; and Martha Drum- 
 mer saw. 
 
 She took the two years deaconess course at 
 the Methodist women s training school in Boston, 
 and then the three years course for a nurse. In 
 February, 1906, she was ready to go. She was 
 sent to Quessua, Angola, West Africa, where 
 there was only one colored missionary in the prov 
 ince Miss Susan Collins, at the Quessua orphan 
 age and to her village and school Miss Drummer 
 was assigned. 
 
 Being a missionary in Africa is a pretty sharp 
 test of one s desire to serve, and Quessua is no 
 exception to this rule. It is in Angola, down on 
 the West Coast, in the temperate zone, 3,500 feet 
 above sea-level. If the swamps could be drained, 
 it would be a pleasant country. The village takes 
 its name from a little stream which springs from 
 the foot of Mount Bango near by. Several native 
 villages are close around, but the nearest post- 
 office and telegraph and railroad stations are at 
 Melange, six miles away. When Miss Drummer 
 first went out, the railroad stopped eighty-five 
 miles away, and that distance had to be traveled 
 in a hammock slung on poles carried by native 
 bearers. This seemed to Miss Drummer a selfish 
 way of traveling, so she tried to walk; but she 
 found it a dangerous thing for one unaccustomed 
 to the climate to attempt. She couldn t afford to 
 waste the years and the money her preparation 
 
A Light in a Dark Place 137 
 
 had cost by killing herself with dengue fever as 
 soon as she reached Africa. The porters, trained 
 for generations in such work, and quite at home 
 in the African sun, had no trouble at all in carry 
 ing her. 
 
 At length she was set down in the Quessua or 
 phanage of the Methodist Women s Foreign Mis 
 sion Society. It was a low, small, crowded build 
 ing, with none of the conveniences or comforts to 
 which she had grown accustomed in her years of 
 training; but neither she nor Miss Collins, her 
 fellow-worker, ever mentioned these facts. They 
 were working among savage folk, all of whom lived 
 in poverty and need. Even to-day many of the 
 villagers have no clothing except the skins of wild 
 animals; and many more wear loin cloths or a 
 few yards of cheap cotton wound about their 
 bodies. Those who manage to get something more 
 like our clothes are without any of the comforts 
 of life, as we think of comforts. Miss Collins and 
 Miss Drummer hated to have so much more than 
 the poor people they had come there to help, so 
 they never told of the discomforts. It was not 
 until one of the white women sent out by the 
 Board went there and wrote back about what these 
 colored women were putting up with that any one 
 at home knew. A comfortable two-story home, 
 with plenty of room, was then built for them, and 
 they could not help enjoying it. 
 
 But though their home is at the foot of the 
 
138 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 mountain in this high country and commands a 
 beautiful view, it is neither as healthful nor as 
 comfortable as it would be in a different climate. 
 The heavy African rains pour down for months 
 until the land is saturated with water, and every 
 valley and little hollow become a marsh. Here 
 insect pests breed by millions, carrying not only 
 grave discomfort, but disease and even death. So 
 heavy are the rains that it takes nearly the whole 
 of the dry season for the swamps to disappear. 
 Then the rains come again, and the marshes begin 
 once more to form. 
 
 Not long after Miss Drummer reached Quessua 
 an epidemic of fever broke out. She herself 
 nursed thirty-eight cases, bringing thirty-seven 
 back to health. The suffering from disease, so 
 much of it preventable, and from the ignorance 
 which makes sickness even more dangerous, she 
 still finds among the hardest things to bear. In 
 her trips through the heathen villages, she takes 
 as many simple remedies as she can, never know 
 ing what she may have to face. On a recent trip 
 she heard a baby screaming with pain. The child 
 was ill, and the mother had sent for the witch 
 doctor, the only doctor she had ever known about. 
 He had cut the baby s head in ugly gashes and 
 given the mother a mixture of green leaves boiled 
 together to rub into the wounds. Poor ignorant 
 soul! She sat there torturing her baby in the 
 belief that she was doing the only thing that could 
 
A Light in a Dark Place 139 
 
 t 
 
 save its life. Another baby had a great boil on 
 its neck which would not come to a head until 
 Miss Drummer s magic salve brought relief. The 
 mother was sure the owner of the magic stuff 
 was a god. The witch-doctors were the most won 
 derful of human beings, she knew; and no witch 
 doctor could do a thing like that; it must be the 
 work of a god ! 
 
 After five years in Africa Miss Drummer wrote 
 to a friend, "I hardly think you could enjoy the 
 hardships here. I fit in like a cup in a saucer; 
 but you see I ve always had things hard. ... I m 
 not reaping where another has sown, so I m get 
 ting a taste of real heathenism. They think it 
 folly to teach a woman anything but farm work. 
 They think we ought to give them presents for 
 letting us feed and teach a girl. . . . You have no 
 conception of their heathenish customs. ... I am 
 glad from my soul that I came. Last Sunday I 
 spoke to over two hundred people in one yard. 
 We have all our services at the mission station in 
 the morning, so the afternoon can be used for 
 Tillage work. All my services are outdoors. 
 
 "My regular work is in the orphanage with 
 forty girls. This is our family. My co-worker 
 has spent twenty-one years in Africa. She is a 
 fine house-mother. We have six children under 
 six years and two just on their legs for the first 
 time and into all sorts of mischief. One has just 
 poured a cup of sand in the middle of my clean 
 
140 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 floor. But they are nice, if they are naughty some 
 times. I have learned that everything human is 
 human. 
 
 "I put a great part of my earnings in my work. 
 I started to ask the Lord for twenty-five desks for 
 the school; but I got ashamed and got up to an 
 swer the prayer myself. I am negotiating now. 
 If my fifty dollars won t cover buying and freight, 
 I will ask the Lord to raise what is lacking. Pray 
 for me. I am engaged in the best of services, for 
 the best of masters, and on the best of terms." 
 
 Miss Drummer has served not only her own 
 people, but any who were in need. When she came 
 home in 1911 she said she had nursed people of 
 twelve nationalities. A Portuguese officer, out in 
 the wilds, brought his young wife to this mission 
 ary nurse *s home as the only place where medical 
 care could be secured for her. When the wife went 
 back home, Miss Drummer went with her to care 
 for her and the baby through the hard journey. 
 The officer wanted her to stay with them a while 
 and rest; but her work called her. After paying 
 his wife s expenses, he gave Miss Drummer fifty 
 dollars personally as an expression of his grati 
 tude. At that time she had some more prayers on 
 hand to answer herself, so she spent ten dollars 
 for a silver watch and gave the rest of the money 
 to the orphanage. 
 
 In 1918 Miss Drummer came home on furlough 
 again and spoke at many white missionary gath- 
 
A Light in a Dark Place 141 
 
 erings with telling effect. She did not like their 
 prayers, she said, so one day she told them about 
 it. She said they all prayed for China and Japan 
 and India and the islands of the sea and Mexico 
 and South America, "and all the rest. * It was 
 that < all the rest > she was tired of. < There isn t 
 any all the rest but Africa," she said. "Call it 
 by its name. Say * Africa when you pray, and 
 then maybe you will think to pray for it oftener." 
 
 In Boston she made so strong an appeal for 
 her medical work that a thousand dollars was 
 given her from the floor before she could sit down. 
 She made them see her people, the suffering old 
 folk, the poor, hopeless mothers, the little chil 
 dren, as ready to learn kindness and happiness 
 and to grow strong and healthy as any of the 
 children of the world. 
 
 When she returned to Africa, she bought a 
 donkey for near-by trips, as riding would be 
 cheaper than going in a hammock. He was such 
 a solemn donkey that she named him Jeremiah. 
 He was very gentle and went beautifully on dry 
 land, but he refused entirely to cross a stream 
 or to step in a muddy place. He was gentle, but 
 inflexible. So she had to sell him, saying that 
 "a stubborn donkey without rubbers" was not 
 much help in mission work in such a new country. 
 
 Trips make up a large part of the work of a 
 missionary in Africa. The longer ones must be 
 taken in the dry season and often occupy several 
 
142 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 weeks. "Where it is possible, two missionaries go 
 together, with five or six bearers apiece for their 
 hammocks and baggage. Much of their food must 
 be carried in a box as nearly insect-proof as pos 
 sible. This box is all the furniture, except the 
 camp-beds, they have with them. After they take 
 out their food and granite plates, they sit on the 
 chest while they eat. If they forget the salt or 
 anything else, they must both stand up while they 
 hunt it out. Men, women, and children crowd 
 about them while they eat, touching them, feeling 
 their clothes, peering at them, and talking about 
 their looks, their food, and the way they eat it, 
 until meal-time is an ordeal gladly ended. 
 
 At first Miss Drummer felt she must share her 
 food with all these curious and sometimes hungry 
 folk, but she found she could not possibly carry 
 enough for the throngs of even a single village; 
 she had to keep the contents of her box for her 
 self or give up all thought of missionary journeys. 
 And after all, she found this enforced eating in 
 public a very good way of advertising her pres 
 ence and attracting a crowd to hear the story she 
 had come so far to tell. 
 
 The instant the plates are back in the box, and 
 before the people begin to scatter, Miss Drummer 
 gets them to sit down on the grass and begins to 
 sing a hymn, teaching it to them line by line. 
 " Jesus loves me" is usually the one she begins 
 with, and they are quick to learn it. Then she 
 
A Light in a Dark Place 143 
 
 reads and explains a few verses from the Bible 
 and closes with a short prayer. 
 
 One evening she and her helper came to a village 
 called Ngala. The chief gave them the biggest 
 half of his two-room hut to sleep in. He and his 
 family took the smaller room, and the missionaries 
 put their camp-beds in one end of the other, cur 
 taining off with the hammocks a place at the other 
 end for their ten bearers to sleep on mats. The 
 chief s goats and chickens slept in the room also, 
 and plenty of rats no, the rats didn t sleep 1 
 That was their time for exercise. The mission 
 aries got some eggs and sweet potatoes in the 
 village and cooked their supper on a little out 
 door fire. They had a prayer-meeting in the hut. 
 Miss Drummer and her helper sat on the bed, one 
 holding the candle, the other reading the Bible 
 and talking. The room was packed with young 
 and old, all straining to catch a word. Nor would 
 they go away when the meeting was over until 
 the candle was put out and there was no more 
 chance to stare at the strangers. 
 
 Next morning nearly two hundred of the villag 
 ers went a couple of miles with them on their way, 
 begging, as they so often do, for some one to come 
 and stay with them and teach them "the new 
 way." Miss Drummer finds that everywhere she 
 goes, the songs that they like best are those that 
 tell of the great Friend, and of the love of God. 
 They need a Friend so much ! 
 
144 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 One night she came to a village where the only 
 shelter to be had was a hut with only two-and-a- 
 half sides to it. The bearers stretched the ham 
 mocks around the open part to keep out wild 
 animals. Just as they were dropping off to sleep 
 after the meeting, they heard terrible noises a 
 hyena attacking a cow. The government does not 
 allow the natives to have firearms, so the whole 
 village got out of bed to make noise enough 
 to scare the hyena away. They screamed and 
 ran about with fishing-spears and with feathers 
 and horns stuck on their heads. They were afraid 
 the visitors had made the hyena so bold, for while 
 there are many all about, they do not often come 
 right into the village as this one did and kill a 
 hog and attack a cow. Miss Drummer was afraid 
 the people would not come to her meeting in the 
 morning, but they did, and afterward they went 
 along the road with her for quite a distance. 
 
 One great trouble on these journeys is the dif 
 ficulty of finding water. They must get down by 
 a wayside stream to do their washing, for they 
 can hardly carry enough clothes to last without 
 laundering on these long trips. Sometimes as 
 they scrub things in the stream, they hear a pan 
 ther or a hyena howling near by and decide it is 
 best to move on. On reaching the villages, they 
 may find the nearest water is a mile or two away, 
 and when they go to it, it may be covered with 
 green scum. Thirsty as they are, they cannot 
 
A Light in a Dark Place 145 
 
 drink it, but they boil it and make tea or cocoa 
 and drink that. 
 
 The women in these villages work very hard. 
 They do all the work in the fields, from planting 
 to harvesting, as well as all the work in the homes. 
 One heavy task is the making of flour. For this 
 they dig and dry the root of the manioca, a plant 
 which grows in great abundance, and pound it 
 fine. No wonder they do not have time to think 
 about the way they look. There are mats to be 
 woven for the houses, baskets to be made for 
 bringing in the crops, skins to dress, and so on. 
 Usually the men fight and hunt, but occasionally 
 they work. Once Miss Drummer found an old 
 chief crippled with leprosy setting an example of 
 industry to his people by making rope. But per 
 haps if he had not been crippled, he too would 
 have been hunting or fighting. 
 
 Some things we spend a good deal of time on, 
 these people make very short work of. For in 
 stance, think how mothers in this country comb 
 and brush their own and their children s hair 
 every day. An African woman does the family s 
 hair to last for months or even years. She pow 
 ders up a red stone, mixes it with oil, and rubs it in 
 until the hair is all dyed red. Then she does it up 
 in funny little tight braids all over the head, and 
 that child s hair is off her mind for good. Our 
 notions about hair seem very peculiar to them. 
 Once a white missionary went on a trip with Miss 
 
146 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 Drummer. They crowded into the room, as usual, 
 and they thought the missionary s hair the very 
 queerest thing their eyes had ever beheld. It 
 was so straight and funny, with such a queer, big 
 knot. They said she looked like a "hoje," or 
 lion, with a big mane. So you see our being ac 
 customed or unaccustomed to things has a great 
 deal to do with our thinking them ugly or pretty. 
 
 One day when Miss Drummer was nearing a vil 
 lage she met the chief and some of his people 
 going hunting. They turned back and went to 
 the village with her, saying to each other they 
 didn t dare not to, for the gods had come and 
 would be angry with them if they didn t listen to 
 them. The chief said he would call his people 
 in his other villages. This he did by means of 
 a telephone of real African make. They brought 
 out a "drum," which was a hollow log with holes 
 all down the sides, and they beat it with little 
 wooden mallets. The sound carries for miles, 
 and it means, "Come quick. It s the chief s 
 orders. It would be a very bold man who would 
 disobey a summons like that. They can send 
 other messages, too, for they have a code of long 
 and short taps that can be made into all sorts of 
 sentences. 
 
 In one of the many villages where the people 
 begged for teachers they said, when Miss Drum 
 mer told them there was no one to send, "Oh, 
 surely you can find one person to send! And 
 
A Light in a Dark Place 147 
 
 if you will, we will build a hut for her. Send us 
 just one." And think of all the people here in 
 America who are not doing anything to really 
 help other people, and who could so easily go ! 
 
 The people in Africa are ready to learn. On 
 her way back from one of these long trips Miss 
 Drummer met some men from a village she had 
 been to a couple of weeks before. They were out 
 hunting. They told her they had been keeping 
 Sunday since she had been there. They wanted 
 a teacher, too. Some miles further down the road 
 the missionaries heard some little children sing 
 ing " Jesus loves me," and came upon a company 
 from another village who had heard in some way 
 that the missionaries were coming on their way 
 back home. The old crippled chief was with them, 
 hobbling along on his cane. He said they had 
 been in such a dangerous country he had expected 
 them to be killed by the natives, and he was so 
 glad they had escaped. They had had no trouble 
 at all, God had taken care of His children who 
 trusted Him. 
 
 It is no easy task being a missionary in Africa. 
 But Martha Drummer has found out that " every 
 thing human is human." May God give us each 
 an understanding heart, that need in any guise 
 may draw us, and that we may recognize our 
 brothers and love them wherever and whatever 
 they maybe! 
 
XI 
 SURE FOUNDATIONS 
 
 IN Wake County, N. C., James Duns ton was 
 born, before the war, but born free, as his 
 father had been, before him. His father s 
 parents had been set free by their owner before 
 his father s birth; but why the thing was done, 
 he does not know. 
 
 Before the Civil War, there were almost half 
 a million of "free people of color," as they were 
 called, in the United States. Most of them were 
 in the South, and the causes of their freedom 
 were numerous. Frequently a master allowed a 
 very efficient or favored slave to take charge of 
 himself. Such a man, usually skilled in some 
 trade, would hire himself out, paying his master 
 a stated sum each year and keeping the rest for 
 himself. In this way, not infrequently, slaves 
 saved enough to buy themselves; and sometimes 
 they were able to buy their wives and children too. 
 
 Many were set free because their masters did 
 not believe in slavery. George Washington s will 
 provided that all his slaves should be set free at 
 his wife s death; but Mrs. Washington, we are 
 told, as soon as she learned of this provision in 
 sisted on their being set free at once. Some mas- 
 
 148 
 
Sure Foundations 149 
 
 ters, like John Kandolph, of Virginia, not only set 
 their slaves free, but bequeathed money to buy 
 land for them in a free state and to transport them 
 thither. In this way several prosperous colonies 
 were planted in the Middle West. 
 
 Some slaves were set free in gratitude or af 
 fection, after especially faithful service. A few 
 won their freedom by some deed of courage or 
 sacrifice. There is the famous case of the slave 
 in Charleston, South Carolina, who saved St. 
 Michael s Church from the flames. This quaint 
 and ancient Episcopal church, one of the oldest 
 in the country, whose bricks were brought from 
 England in colonial times, and in which many of 
 the state s most distinguished men have wor 
 shiped, is dear to all South Carolinians regard 
 less of church affiliations. The story goes that 
 a fire which swept a whole section of the city was 
 stayed by herculean effort before it reached the 
 church; but just as it was thought to be safe, a 
 great gust of wind blew a bit of burning timber 
 high against the old wooden steeple, where it 
 caught and lodged. A groan went up from the 
 crowd. The church seemed doomed, for human 
 hands could never reach that dangerous peak. 
 The people stood in silent sorrow, watching. Sud 
 denly, from a slit-like window on the side of the 
 steeple there appeared a man who began to climb 
 up towards the brand. The crowd below, thrilled 
 by his heroism, expected every second to see him 
 
150 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 fall to Ms death; he was attempting the impos 
 sible. Yet, as if by miracle, he went on. Higher 
 and higher he crept. At last he reached and 
 seized the brand and flung it clear of the beloved 
 building, down to the churchyard, harmless. A 
 great shout went up to be stilled instantly. 
 Could the man possibly come down safely! Must 
 he pay with his life for the church? The people 
 watched, breathless, till he reached the window 
 again and disappeared inside. A sigh of relief 
 swept over the crowd. Who was he, this hero? 
 They searched one another s faces to see which 
 of their everyday companions was absent, turned 
 hero in an hour. The church door opened and a 
 Negro slave came forth. The story, as told long 
 after by the old sexton, goes that when he stepped 
 out, for a moment Charleston gasped then it 
 cheered ! The mayor ran forward and caught the 
 black man s hand, and after the mayor came the 
 crowd. The slave s master, who was among them, 
 then and there gave him the freedom he had so 
 bravely earned. 
 
 But these fortunate freedmen were the excep 
 tion. The lot of such people was often harder 
 than that of slaves. With no white people to look 
 to for protection or to care for them in sickness or 
 old age, often looked upon with suspicion by their 
 white neighbors, envied, perhaps, and yet despised 
 by the slaves, unable to mingle freely with their 
 
Sure Foundations 151 
 
 own race, and exploited by unscrupulous white 
 people from whom they had no protection, life 
 was indeed difficult for many of this class. 
 
 James Dunston s parents found it so. His 
 father rented land from a white farmer and 
 worked as hard as he could. But the land was 
 poor, nothing was known about scientific agricul 
 ture, and farm machinery was a thing of the 
 future. The family was large, and the task of 
 filling the hungry mouths was almost more than 
 the father and mother could manage. They lived 
 in a poor little cabin and knew nothing about the 
 most ordinary comforts of life. But both parents 
 were devout Christians, and they brought up their 
 children with Christian ideals of honesty and kind 
 ness in all their doings. 
 
 James had one great ambition: he wanted to 
 learn to read. But at that time there were no 
 schools for Negroes anywhere. Had he been a 
 slave, he might have been fortunate enough to 
 find among "his white folks" somebody his 
 Christian mistress, perhaps, or one of her daugh 
 ters who would have gratified his great desire 
 and started him on the path to knowledge. But 
 who was there to teach a free Negro, a bit of drift 
 wood on the current of life, for whom nobody 
 cared, and whose existence mattered to nobody! 
 He knew what a wild dream his was, and yet he 
 clung to it. 
 
152 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 With poor food and poorer shelter as work s 
 utmost reward, he grew up working on his 
 father s rented place. When he was fifteen he be 
 came a Christian and joined the church. This was 
 in 1866. Not long after, a wonderful thing hap 
 pened: in a log hut not very far away, a school 
 was opened for Negroes ! And the school-teacher 
 was a Negro miracle number two! James was 
 tremendously excited about it. He was going to 
 that school whether he had anything to eat or not. 
 He was going to learn to read. 
 
 The boy got a blue-backed spelling book and 
 started in, as eager a scholar as ever a teacher 
 had. But it was only a little while before his 
 hopes were all in ruins. He found that he already 
 knew as much as his teacher did. He had come 
 to the end of that road. The poor "teacher" did 
 not even know his own ignorance. He knew the 
 alphabet and a few words and could spell out 
 some others. What more in the way of learning 
 could one aspire to! 
 
 James, however, was determined to read the 
 whole Bible right straight through, like well, like 
 white folks. Now that he had the key to words, 
 he meant to unlock the Book. If he couldn t have 
 a teacher to help him, he must work it out for him 
 self, for read he must and would. And he did. 
 
 He clung to his blue-backed speller and his 
 Bible until he mastered both. It took him years 
 to do it in the brief times of rest between his long 
 
Sure Foundations 153 
 
 hours of work in the field. He married, mean 
 time, when he was about twenty years old, and 
 he and his wife started in on the same treadmill 
 life his parents lived renting a few poor acres 
 and a little cabin and working from sun-up till 
 dark for just enough to keep them alive. 
 
 But after a while James Dunston faced the 
 astonishing fact that he was getting a little ahead 
 a few dollars left at the end of the year and 
 never a cent of debt ! New vistas opened before 
 him. He really had the gift of farming as some 
 have the gift of music. For one thing, he dearly 
 loved it and felt the life of the earth very close 
 to that of the God he loved. No trouble was too 
 small or too great for him to take with growing 
 things. He used his wits, too, and profited by 
 his own experience and that of others, as far as he 
 could learn it. While he was still very young, 
 he began to be called a good farmer. 
 
 "The white folks called me that," he said, with 
 a smile as shy as a child s. "I hope you won t 
 think I m boasting I don t mean it that way I 
 just worked hard, and I got the name of doing well 
 with the land." 
 
 Seven years from the time he was married, 
 Dunston bought his first land, four whole acres 
 of it, and all his very own ! To this poor f reed- 
 man of the third generation it must have been a 
 wonderful day. He still rented a place and made 
 a little more than a living on it, but his own land 
 
154 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 was clear profit. Before long the four acres had 
 grown to thirty-five. He felt that he had now 
 mastered adversity, and the future lay plain be 
 fore him, so far as material things were con 
 cerned. 
 
 In other respects it was not at all clear. He 
 was studying his Bible harder than ever, for he 
 had learned to read it all at last and knew much 
 of it by heart. The simplicity and sincerity of 
 his faith made it easy for him to see how simple 
 a thing our Lord s way of living is. He wanted 
 with all his heart to tell other people about it. 
 
 "But how could I preach?" he asked, that 
 curious child-look again in his eyes. "I was 
 so ignorant. I m ignorant yet. And for me to 
 set up to teach my people! I was ashamed of 
 myself for even thinking about it. I kept telling 
 myself it wasn t the Lord calling me, it wasn t 
 anything but my own foolishness. The Lord 
 couldn t want anybody like me to preach. I would 
 put it clean out of my head. And then it would 
 come back. I couldn t get away from it. It kept 
 on that way for years. 
 
 "At last I gave in. I was always ready to give 
 in if the Lord really wanted me, of course, and 
 at last it looked to me like maybe He did, and I d 
 better try it and do the best I could. That would 
 be all He d ask." 
 
 Mr. Dunston began to preach in 1882. He kept 
 right on with his farming all the week he had 
 
Sure Foundations 155 
 
 to do that to live but he began to preach to his 
 neighbors right there where he lived, and they 
 gave him two hundred and fifty dollars a year. 
 All this time he was taking care of his wife, who 
 was an invalid until her death, a few years ago. 
 
 "We went through bad times here in North 
 Carolina after the War reconstruction times, 
 folks called them. It was bad, and it stirred 
 up trouble that lasted a long time. There were 
 some white folks wanted to use the colored folks, 
 especially about election time. It was too much 
 politics; and it wasn t for our good. Our folks 
 were so poor and so ignorant, and they kept ex 
 pecting somebody to come along and do some 
 thing for them or give them something instead 
 of their getting right down to work and doing 
 something for themselves with what muscle and 
 sense the Lord gave them. I made the condition 
 of my people a subject of prayer for years, and 
 their relations with white people, too. And I 
 saw what they needed: they needed to work, to 
 fix up their houses, to educate their children, and 
 quit depending on politics." 
 
 After Dunston understood what was needed, he 
 tried to settle some of the Negroes on land they 
 could buy for themselves. He wanted to help 
 them to own their homes and be independent. 
 He secured two thousand acres, and let the people 
 pay for it as fast as they made the money. By 
 this time he owned three hundred acres himself 
 
156 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 and began with nothing, so he knew others could 
 do the same if they would. 
 
 "But how could you finance so big a project?" 
 he was asked. 
 
 He gave a little chuckling laugh, whether of 
 amusement at the simplicity of any one who could 
 be puzzled over a matter so clear or of happiness 
 in the help which had been given him, one could 
 not tell. 
 
 "Why, the Lord tended to the finances, ma am: 
 I just had to do the part I could manage. I knew 
 three white men who had plenty of money, and 
 they knew me and trusted me. They wouldn t 
 have lent the money to the men I wanted to help 
 they didn t know them like I did. But they 
 lent it to me. Then I picked men I knew I could 
 depend on. 
 
 "Every man on that two thousand acres owns 
 his farm and house now." The farms run from 
 fifty acres to a hundred and sixty. His own land 
 was right alongside, and he lived with the men, 
 plowing and working and running his farm, and 
 of course showing them everything he knew and 
 could learn about right ways of farming. On 
 Sundays they all went to Mr. Dunston s church 
 that first church he took when he began to 
 preach, and where he has been preaching ever 
 since. They built up a good, strong community 
 of Christian people, happy and prosperous, right 
 there on their own land. 
 
Sure Foundations 157 
 
 Of course, they had to have a school. It was a 
 long time ago when all this was started, and school 
 money was then hard to get even for white people, 
 and much harder for colored people. The county 
 board of education agreed that if they would get 
 the land and bear half the cost of the building, 
 the county would bear the other half. The matron 
 at Shaw University, in Raleigh, had some lots in 
 the village. She gave enough land for the school, 
 and the people gave their part of the building, 
 some in money and some in work. As they became 
 able to do so, they improved the school. 
 
 As time went on other villages in that section 
 of the county grew, and the pastor felt the need 
 of more churches. He persuaded about twenty 
 of his members at Shiloh, the original church, to 
 form a new society at Mebane, which was nearer 
 their farms than the old church. There he built 
 up a second membership, dividing time between 
 the two churches on Sundays and working on his 
 farm and with his neighbors during the week. 
 At Mebane he preached the same doctrines that 
 had proved so effective at Shiloh: that religion 
 meant living right every day in one s home and 
 with one s neighbors; and that it also meant hon 
 est work, thrift, and a fair chance for the children. 
 
 In time, after the same manner, a third and a 
 fourth church were added to his charge. Then, 
 the two thousand acres being bought and paid 
 for, he secured fourteen hundred acres more, 
 
158 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 which is still in process of being paid for by the 
 settlers. 
 
 "But I m not farming myself now/ he said, 
 with a touch of what would have been regret if 
 he had not been so sure that everything in life 
 happens just right for the man who trusts in God. 
 "You see, I m seventy years old now, and I m 
 not well, not exactly able to work quite so hard. 
 I did my own plowing as long as I could walk 
 between the handles, but for three or four years 
 now I ve had rather to oversee things and tend 
 to my preaching, and have somebody else do the 
 real work. I ve been farming ever since I was 
 a little boy, but now I ve got to where most of my 
 farming is done." 
 
 "You ve helped a lot of people with your farm 
 ing," it was suggested. 
 
 "Yes m, I have, with the Lord s help. And 
 I ve been able to help with money, too. Tisn t 
 so much, and yet in all these years it counts up, 
 too. Three or four years after I began to preach, 
 I promised the Lord I d give a tenth of all I made 
 to His work, and I ve always had a little some 
 thing ready when it was needed twenty-five dol 
 lars or maybe fifty; I ve never had more than 
 fifty at one time, but then after a while I d have 
 some more, and in thirty-five years it s right sur 
 prising how much it all comes to." 
 
 I was talking to him after service at one of his 
 four churches. I had gone eighteen miles in the 
 
Sure Foundations 159 
 
 country from Durham to see the man whom hard- 
 headed business men of his race speak of as 
 though he were of different clay from the ordinary 
 run of people. l The best Christian I ever knew, 9 
 said one of them; and another, whose own re 
 ligion is respected and believed in by men of both 
 races, said in a tone which lent wonderful mean 
 ing to his words, "I wish you could see him" 
 as if nothing short of that would enable one to 
 understand quite what he was like. 
 
 So I went to one of his churches, where he had 
 been holding a ten days meeting. It is a well- 
 kept building, freshly painted, and seating about 
 two hundred people. It was well over half full, 
 this week-day morning. As I went up the steps, 
 I heard through the open windows the quiet, ear 
 nest voice of the preacher. He had closed his 
 meeting the night before and baptized his con 
 verts. This was just a little farewell talk with 
 the new Christians before he went on his way. 
 They sat on the two front benches, with a goodly 
 gathering of young people behind them and the 
 older members on the sides, while he stood behind 
 the altar railing and told them what being a Chris 
 tian means. 
 
 He may not know very much about books, but 
 he knows the Book he was saturated with it. He 
 said nothing about creed or doctrines, he was talk 
 ing about the life of Christ in the heart. He stood 
 there in his spotless linen and worn, well-brushed 
 
160 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 clothes, an upright, gray-haired old man with a 
 fresh, young, unlined face, and a look of one long 
 acquainted with God and joyfully at peace with 
 Him. There was something child-like about him 
 his simplicity, his lack of self-consciousness. 
 When the service was over and I spoke to him, 
 he talked with me with a sort of gentle shyness 
 which had in it neither distrust nor self -depre 
 ciation. 
 
 The people, young and old, gave him all their 
 attention ; the entrance of a white stranger passed 
 almost unnoticed. They were country people, 
 but they were all comfortably and nicely dressed, 
 clean, healthy, prosperous-looking people. There 
 were a number of men in middle life ir the congre 
 gation men who had left their farms in working 
 hours to hear this old man talk about his Master. 
 When he finished and went down to the front 
 benches to shake hands with the new members and 
 bid them Godspeed, the whole membership rose 
 and followed his example. It seemed to the on 
 looker, as they filed past, that in the older faces 
 was reflected something of the preacher s look. 
 One old woman, especially, had almost the same 
 air of seining peace. 
 
 Somehow the old man seemed typical of Christ s 
 work for men in all countries and races and 
 through the centuries. -Most of the service men 
 need cannot be given by learned or gifted people 
 there are not enough of them to go around. No 
 
Sure Foundations 161 
 
 unusual equipment is necessary to really help no 
 unusual gifts ; only an unusual faithfulness in the 
 use of ordinary gifts, such faithfulness as any of 
 us may bring to our service if we will. And when 
 we bring it, He uses it like this. All over the 
 world it is love of Him in somebody s heart that 
 has laid, and is yet laying, foundations of char 
 acter, of opportunity, of higher ideals, of cleaner, 
 happier, everyday living among poor and hitherto 
 unfriended folk, lifting them from whatever depth 
 they may be in toward that high end for which 
 mankind was made. 
 
 It was this simple, loving, faithful service from 
 some who had come to know God that first 
 lifted our own savage ancestors, and many an 
 other wild race, and set their feet on the long road 
 toward Christian civilization. All over the South 
 to-day, among the poorest, this force is at work. 
 It is like the lifting power of light, silently, the 
 world around, drawing unnumbered tons of cold, 
 dark earth into the beauty and glory of green 
 leaves and flowers and food for a hungry world. 
 
 This old man, James Dunston, as he goes from 
 village to village, with the peace of God in his 
 face, is one of the real builders of America s pros 
 perity and progress. It is people of his spirit 
 who lay the real foundations of race or national 
 life the only foundations that can endure. 
 
XII 
 A SEED OF FLAME 
 
 WHEN" Negro literature is mentioned, 
 most white people think of Paul Lau 
 rence Dtmbar, the great Negro poet 
 whom William Dean Howells discovered, and of 
 whom he proclaimed to all America that, Negro or 
 no Negro, here was a writer "of innate distinc 
 tion " whose " refined and delicate art" attained 
 * i a very artistic completeness. Dunbar has been 
 widely read, and his gifts as widely acknowledged. 
 To many white people he still represents the whole 
 of Negro literature. Others, however, add a few 
 names to his. No one who has read Dr. DuBois s 
 Souls of Black Folk will deny that it is litera 
 ture of most unusual quality, or will they soon 
 forget its haunting beauty. Eeaders of the At 
 lantic Monthly know Chesnutt s stories and the 
 poems of Braithwaite, whose work has also ap 
 peared in the Century. Mr. Braithwaite is dis 
 tinguished as both poet and critic, having served 
 in the latter capacity on the staff of the Boston 
 Transcript for many years. Since 1913 he has 
 issued a yearly anthology, giving the best poems 
 of the year which have appeared in American 
 periodicals. He edits the New Poetry Review of 
 
 162 
 
A Seed of Flame 163 
 
 Cambridge, and is general editor of the series of 
 Contemporary American Poets. 
 
 Of these four men, Dunbar, born in 1872, was 
 the youngest. Of the still younger generation of 
 Negro writers, few white people are aware. One 
 reason for this is that the younger men, growing 
 up in a new time, are passionately concerned for 
 justice to their race. They have chosen between 
 protest and literature, and men like James Weldon 
 Johnson and others of his class, who could un 
 doubtedly achieve distinction in the latter field, 
 are pouring their gifts and energies into other 
 channels. There will be those after them, they 
 say, to write essays and novels and poems ; their 
 work is something more pressing. 
 
 But this story is of none of these. It is the 
 story of one who barely crossed the threshold of 
 manhood, of a poet most of whose poems were 
 still unwritten when his long struggle with suffer 
 ing ended in the fulness of life and light. 
 
 There was no struggle against hardship in this 
 boy s youth, no fight for an education against 
 odds. His father had waged that fight and won 
 it splendidly before the boy was born. The son 
 opened his baby eyes in a home of comfort and 
 refinement and grew up a boy of brilliant promise, 
 an only son, and the idol of his parents. 
 
 His father, Joseph S. Cotter, for whom the boy 
 was named, was the son of a slave who was her 
 self the daughter of free Negroes, but in some 
 
164 In the Vanguard of a Bac 
 
 way she had been bonded as a slave. She must 
 have seemed a strange woman, with much of her 
 life beyond the understanding of the slaves about 
 her. She worked hard, but she sang a great deal, 
 improvising her songs as she worked. She made 
 up plays and acted them before her admiring fel 
 low-slaves. She was a deeply religious woman 
 who was sometimes caught up into religious ec 
 stasies. There was plainly something in her quite 
 different from those about her. In thinking of 
 her and of her son and her grandson, in whom her 
 own strange spark of life flamed up, one is re 
 minded of Browning s lines: 
 
 God drops his seed of heavenly flame 
 Just where He wills on earth. 
 
 Looking at the slave woman, "the naked unpre- 
 paredness of rock" seems best to describe the bar 
 ren circumstances into which the seed had fallen 
 for her. For a long time life seemed little more 
 propitious for her son. He learned to read when 
 he was four years old, but forgot all about it, being 
 long unused to books ; so that when, in his early 
 twenties, he entered night-school, he had to learn 
 the alphabet all over again. 
 
 But he used some of his gifts in those lean years, 
 nevertheless. At ten years of age he was work 
 ing with boys and men in a brickyard in Louis 
 ville, Kentucky. He was set upon by the bigger 
 boys and much tormented. Knowing the hopeless 
 ness of physical resistance, Joseph set his wits to 
 
A Seed of Flame 165 
 
 work. He noticed that in the noon hour the men 
 gathered around those of their number who could 
 tell a good story. Why shouldn t boys do the 
 same? And something within him told him he 
 could furnish the stories. So he tried it and found 
 it worked like a charm. The boys forgot to tease 
 and crowded round him with growing respect and 
 interest. The men, noticing their absorption from 
 day to day, began to stroll over to investigate, 
 and before long there was only one group at the 
 noon hour boys and men gathered around the 
 little black boy, listening to the tales which he 
 daily fashioned for them out of his own fancies. 
 
 At the age of twenty-two, hunger for an educa 
 tion stirred within him, and he went to night- 
 school, beginning with the alphabet. In two 
 years time he was prepared to teach, and from 
 that day to this he has been a student. He be 
 came principal of the Louisville Coleridge-Tay 
 lor school, named in honor of the great Negro 
 musician who lives in London and is ranked as 
 one of the foremost composers of our time. Mr. 
 Cotter s work, however, is not confined to the 
 school. When Louisville, first of all Southern 
 cities, opened playgrounds for colored children, 
 this older Joseph Cotter gave them a story-hour. 
 He does the same thing at the two colored 
 branches of the Louisville Public Library, and 
 is helping to inspire and train in the same fine 
 
166 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 art young teachers and the children who will one 
 day teach. He owns a comfortable home and 
 a library especially rich in poetry. He has his 
 mother s love of poetry and her gift, with a finer 
 power of expression. A poet himself, he first 
 made Dunbar known among his own people in the 
 South, quick to acknowledge in another the gift 
 he himself shared. 
 
 Into this home came Joseph Cotter, Jr., in Sep 
 tember, 1895. He and his sister Florence, who 
 was two years older, grew up together, devoted 
 friends and chums. Florence taught Joseph to 
 read. When he started to school at the mature 
 age of six, he had read about thirty books, includ 
 ing the readers of all the eight grades of the 
 public schools and parts of the Bible. 
 
 The parents, seeing how eagerly their children 
 learned, very wisely held them back. They were 
 both rather delicate, and their father and mother 
 felt that sound bodies were of the first importance. 
 Several times they refused consent when the chil 
 dren s teachers would have given them more rapid 
 promotion ; yet even so, Florence graduated from 
 high school at sixteen with first honors, and Jos 
 eph, two years later, graduated at the same age, 
 with second honors. He was first in scholarship, 
 but some bit of mischief had forced his teachers 
 to discipline him, and so he was given second 
 place. 
 
 He seems to have been a real boy, for all his 
 
A Seed of Flame 167 
 
 . i 
 
 physical delicacy and his voracious love of books. 
 He worked hard as a newsboy, and while he was 
 still a little fellow, he and his friends formed a 
 grass-cutting club and made it pay. He did not 
 waste the money he earned, but showed self-con 
 trol and good sense in managing it. He was in 
 terested in doing all he could for himself. 
 
 The boy was an enthusiast in athletics and dis 
 tinguished himself in them. He was especially 
 fond of football, which he played well despite his 
 slight physique. He always said it took brains 
 rather than muscle to play football anyway, and 
 the handicap he would not yield to could not block 
 his way. While he was in high school, his jaw wasi 
 broken by a base-ball and had to be wired in place. 
 For two weeks he could not open his mouth, and 
 was fed liquids through a straw; but he kept on 
 attending school, doing his work well. 
 
 He was a quiet chap, with gentle and courteous 
 manners; but if he felt it necessary, he would 
 fight, giving his entire interest and attention to 
 the matter in hand. He was popular because he 
 thought of others. One of his great gifts was 
 the power to draw people out, and he was always 
 ready to help them discover the best in them 
 selves. 
 
 Joseph was as fond of books as of people. The 
 books of poetry in his father s library especially 
 appealed to him, and he drank deep of this great 
 spring of literature and of life. 
 
168 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 That lie should be particularly well-informed on 
 the race question seems a matter of course; the 
 significant thing is that his interest was never 
 confined to it. His alert and eager mind went out 
 to the whole world, to everything that concerned 
 the Race of Man, to which all races belong. He 
 was a keen student of world history and world 
 movements, and this explains the poise and bal 
 ance of his outlook on the problems of the race 
 with which he himself was identified. This atti 
 tude is well shown in the following poem which is 
 not only filled with a courage that looks facts and 
 the world squarely in the face but is saturated 
 with serenity of soul : 
 
 The Mulatto to His Critics 
 
 Ashamed of my race? 
 
 And of what race am I? 
 
 I am many in one. 
 
 Through my veins there flows the blood 
 
 Of Red Man, Black Man, Briton, Celt, and Scot, 
 
 In warring clash and tumultuous riot. 
 
 I welcome all, 
 
 But love the blood of the kindly race 
 
 That swarths my skin, crinkles my hair, 
 
 And puts sweet music into my soul. 
 
 "And puts sweet music into my soul." That is 
 especially the dower of African blood. It pours 
 out in kindly laughter and friendly human cheer 
 fulness amid circumstances which would turn Nor 
 dic blood to gall or flame. It wells up to God in 
 the strange, soul-moving melody of the " spir 
 ituals " out of slavery itself. White slaves have 
 
1 Ji uiin Ktmlio, Louisville, Kjj. 
 
 JOSKIMI S. COTTER, JR. 
 
A Seed of Flame 169 
 
 attained spiritual vision Epictetus is undying 
 witness to that, but did ever a whole race of 
 slaves lift their hearts in song before? When the 
 races of men are all developed and the contribu 
 tion of each to the Race of Man can be defined, that 
 of the African race will be based on this very 
 quality that it "puts sweet music into my soul." 
 
 After finishing at high school, Joseph followed 
 his sister to Fisk University at Nashville. He was 
 there for a year and a half when he developed 
 tuberculosis and was forced to come home. For 
 six years he fought a good fight, his soul conquer 
 ing, his body going under, slipping down toward 
 the last surrender in increasing weakness and 
 pain. As long as he could move, he worked. He 
 was associate editor of the Louisville Leader, a 
 position which suited him and which he filled with 
 ability. 
 
 In December of the year in which Joseph left 
 the university, his sister Florence was stricken 
 with the same disease and came home, as he had 
 done, to go under the doctor s care. She died just 
 a year later, in December, 1914. 
 
 This was a heavy sorrow. The family was a 
 deeply affectionate one, and the tie between the 
 brother and sister was unusually close. It was 
 while visiting her grave, some months after her 
 death, that the impulse came upon him to ex 
 press his grief in verse, and he wrote there the 
 lines, "To Florence," which began his career as 
 
170 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 a poet. He recognized clearly that it was a ques 
 tion of but a short time before his own body would 
 be laid beside hers, but he went on, meeting life 
 as best he could from day to day, with failing 
 strength but with a valiant heart. He had the best 
 of medical care, and the white physician who at 
 tended him said that for courage, patience, and 
 cheerfulness, he was, during the six years of his 
 illness, the most remarkable patient he had ever 
 had. 
 
 One of his special friends in the grass-cutting 
 club of his boyhood was Abram Simpson, the 
 youngest colored captain in the World War, and 
 now a banker in Louisville. While he was facing 
 death in France, Joseph, his friend, was facing it 
 here at home in the silence of his quiet room. 
 
 But no one who suffers much and yet turns to 
 those about him a steady and cheerful spirit can 
 achieve that victory without times of fierce inward 
 struggle. Yet in the little book of poems published 
 a year before his death there is but one hint of dis 
 couragement. It is this short poem : 
 
 Supplication 
 
 I am so tired and weary, 
 
 So tired of the endless fight, 
 So weary of waiting the dawn 
 
 And finding endless night, 
 That I ask but rest and quiet 
 
 Kest for the days that are gone, 
 And quiet for the little space 
 
 That I must journey on. 
 
 Next to this, however, we find the following: 
 
A Seed of Flame 171 
 
 The Goal 
 
 I have found joy, 
 
 Surcease from sorrow, 
 From qualms for today 
 
 And fears for tomorrow. 
 
 I have found love 
 
 Sifted of pain, 
 Of life s harsh goading 
 
 And worldly disdain. 
 
 I have found peace 
 
 Still-born from grief, 
 From soul s bitter mocking, 
 
 And heart s unbelief. 
 
 Now may I rest, 
 
 Soul-glad and free; 
 For, Lord, in the travail 
 
 1 have found Thee. 
 
 That his pure joy in the beauty of the world 
 about him was fresh and keen this lyric witnesses, 
 almost singing itself : 
 
 Rain Music 
 
 On the dusty earth -drum 
 
 Beats the falling rain, 
 Now a whispered murmur, 
 
 Now a louder strain. 
 
 Slender silvery drumsticks, 
 
 On an ancient drum, 
 Beat the mellow music, 
 
 Bidding life to come. 
 
 Chords of earth awakened, 
 
 Notes of greening spring, 
 Rise and fall triumphant 
 
 Over everything. 
 
 Slender silvery drumsticks 
 
 Beat the long tattoo 
 God, the great musician, 
 
 Calling life anew. 
 
172 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 The little book of poems published before his 
 death takes its name, The Band of Gideon, from 
 the first poem in the book, a weird fancy of storm- 
 driven black clouds, which seems akin to some of 
 the old " spirituals. The book is manifestly the 
 work of youth and as such, immature. "A 
 Prayer " voices his own consciousness of this, and 
 his desire to work out in well-wrought lines that 
 which he sees with the eyes of his soul but cannot 
 yet fully express. 
 
 A Prayer 
 
 As I lie in bed, 
 
 Flat on my back, 
 
 There passes across my ceiling 
 
 An endless panorama of things 
 
 Quick steps of gay-voiced children, 
 
 Adolescence in its wondering silences, 
 
 Maid and man on moonlit summer s eve, 
 
 Women in the holy glow of motherhood, 
 
 Old men gazing silently through the twilight 
 
 Into the beyond. 
 
 O God, give me words to make my dream-children live. 
 
 The strongest poem in the book, with one ex 
 ception, is a sonnet, u To the Negro Soldiers." 
 Confined to his bed by suffering, he was now often 
 too weak to write or to think, but his heart was 
 with his comrades who had gone to the front, and 
 with them he hoped most passionately that the loy 
 alty and sacrifice of Negro Americans during the 
 war would win for the race a better justice here 
 at home and fuller respect as citizens. 
 
A Seed of Flame 173 
 
 To the Negro Soldiers 
 
 They shall go down unto Life s Borderland, 
 Walk unafraid within that Living Hell, 
 Nor heed the driving rain of shot and shell 
 
 That round them falls; but with uplifted hand 
 
 Be one with mighty hosts, an armed band 
 
 Against man s wrong to man for such full well 
 They know. And from their trembling lips shall swell 
 
 A song of hope the world can understand. 
 
 All this to them shall be a glorious sign, 
 A glimmer of that resurrection morn 
 
 When age-long faith, crowned with a grace benign, 
 Shall rise and from their brows cast down the thorn 
 
 Of prejudice. E en though through blood it be, 
 
 There breaks this day their dawn of liberty. 
 
 Joseph Cotter s best work was done for the 
 most part after the publication of his book. It is 
 found in a sequence of nineteen love-sonnets of 
 remarkable beauty and workmanship for so young 
 a man. They are published in the A. M. E. Zion 
 Quarterly Review for the third quarter of 1920. 
 The last one, especially, of the little child 
 
 Who never was, nor is, nor e er shall be. 
 
 is of a moving and haunting beauty. He left these 
 sonnets, with a few short poems and one-act plays, 
 unpublished at his death. 
 
 He sank toward death for years, fighting at 
 every step. At the last, sight and hearing failed 
 him, yet his whispered words were still of courage 
 and cheer. He died in his father s arms on the 
 third day of February, 1919. 
 
 Considering his youth and the heavy handicap 
 of illness during those few years, when, even in 
 
174 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 full vigor, his powers would but have been put 
 ting forth their first buds, his literary achieve 
 ments are full of promise a promise which in 
 God s own time will find fulfilment in a broader 
 life than this. One quality of his work is its di 
 rect and full sincerity. This quality blazes 
 through what is, to the writer, the strongest of 
 all his poems. There is no bitterness in it, nor 
 was there any in his life, yet he knew the facts 
 knew them better and knew more of them, 
 doubtless, than we white people ever do. And 
 what he knew he felt. He was fully identified in 
 his own heart and will with the Negro race his 
 people, entirely his people, though strains of many 
 races mingled in his life. But feeling as he did 
 the injustices from which his people suffer, he asks 
 without rancor or reproach of his white brother: 
 
 And What Shall You Say? 
 
 Brother, come! 
 
 And let us go unto our God. 
 
 And when we stand before Him 
 
 I shall say 
 
 "Lord, I do not hate, 
 
 I am hated. 
 
 I scourge no one, 
 
 I am scourged. 
 
 I covet no lands, 
 
 My lands are coveted. 
 
 I mock no peoples, 
 
 My peoples are mocked." 
 
 And, brother, what shall you say? 
 
 The longer one thinks of it, the deeper that 
 question presses in, the more one feels its quiet, 
 
A Seed of Flame 175 
 
 inescapable power. The words fit the thought and 
 the thought the truth the truth as regards a 
 whole great section of American life as a glove 
 fits the hand. It is a question which will even 
 tually compel its answer, and as it is answered, 
 will the fate of America be. This book, put forth 
 by the Council of Women for Home Missions and 
 the Missionary Education Movement in the inter 
 est of justice and kindness between the races, is 
 itself one of many indications, small and great, 
 that in these later years the Christian mind is 
 turning toward the right answer. 
 
 For too long white Christians felt that individ 
 ual kindness and justice to individual Negroes was 
 the full measure of Christian obligation. In the 
 great awakening now upon the South is seen and 
 felt the birth of a new consciousness and a new 
 conscience a sense of collective responsibility for 
 community conditions. The North, industrially a 
 generation in the lead, came by a social conscious 
 ness and a social conscience before the South. But 
 North and South, there is needed a fuller awak 
 ening as regards both justice and kindness to our 
 Negro brethren as a race. The individuals who 
 have understood this are drawing together all 
 over the country, and in every state their num 
 bers grow. A new public opinion is creating new 
 alignments, and old prejudices and foolish fears 
 are "crystallizing out" in the process. True ra 
 cial integrity is seen to involve the self-respect of 
 
176 In the Vanguard of a Race 
 
 each race and mutual respect between the races. 
 To keep each race separate and pure no man of 
 either race must hate or scourge or mock or de 
 spise the other. All such enmity must cease. The 
 young people coming on as well as those who are 
 now leaders must, in the presence of God, settle 
 the question, 
 "And, brother, what shall you say?" 
 
 0455 
 
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