Silas X. Floyd's Short Stories for Colored People Both Old and Young: Entertaining, Uplifting, InterestingFloyd, Silas Xavier
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Silas X. Floyd's Short Stories for Colored People Both Old and Young: Entertaining, Uplifting, Interesting
Floyd, Silas Xavier
African Americans -- Fiction; African Americans -- Juvenile fiction; Didactic fiction; Short stories, American
No matter whose children they are--no matter what schools they have
attended--these “don’t-care” girls are no good, and good girls ought not
to associate with them. Every day such flippant girls are treading on
dangerous ground, and some day, unless a merciful God prevents it, she
will come to open disgrace and die and go to torment. I am hoping to see
the day when all the “don’t-care” girls will have passed out of
existence, and then all our girls will be of the refined and womanly
kind who do care a great deal about their conduct, their manners and
their morals. I don’t want my daughter to associate with any other
kind.
A PRAYER.
As the potter moulds the clay,
Slowly, gently, day by day,
Till at length he brings to pass
Beauty from a shapeless mass;
So, dear Lord, with patient art,
Take Thou, now, my forward heart,
And, O Lord, in love divine,
Mould and make me wholly thine.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO YOUNG PEOPLE.
Shortly before he died Frederick Douglass made a tour through the South.
Among other places he visited Atlanta University. At that place he made
an address to the young people. It is so full of hope and help that I
wanted to place it where every ambitious black boy and girl in America
can see it. It has never been published before, except in the Bulletin
of Atlanta University. Mr. Douglass said:
[Illustration: FREDERICK DOUGLASS.]
“My young friends: I see before me an assemblage of young people, full
of the blood of youth, just entering upon the voyage of life. It is an
interesting spectacle to me, as to us all, to meet such an assembly as I
see before me this morning in an institution of learning, of knowledge,
and of ethics and of Christian graces. I experience great pleasure in
what I see to-day. There is no language to describe my feelings. It was
no mere image that John saw and described in the apocalypse. It was a
new heaven and a new earth indeed. When I look back upon the time when I
was a fugitive slave I recollect the evils and cruelty of
slave-hunting. No mountain was so high, no valley was so deep, no glen
so secluded, no place so sacred to liberty that I could put my foot upon
it and say I was free! But now I am free! Contrasting my condition then
and now the change exceeds what John saw upon the isle of Patmos. A
change vast and wonderful, that came by the fulfilling of laws. We got
freed by laws, marvellous in our eyes. Men, brave men, good men, who had
the courage of their convictions, were arrested and subjected to
persecutions, mobs, lawlessness, violence. They had the conviction of
truth. Simple truth lasts forever!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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