Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
Let justice be both sure and swift; but let it be justice under the
law, and not the wild and crooked savagery of a mob.
There is another matter which has a direct bearing upon this matter of
lynching and of the brutal crime which sometimes calls it forth and at
other times merely furnishes the excuse for its existence. It is out of
the question for our people as a whole permanently to rise by treading
down any of their own number. Even those who themselves for the moment
profit by such maltreatment of their fellows will in the long run also
suffer. No more shortsighted policy can be imagined than, in the
fancied interest of one class, to prevent the education of another
class. The free public school, the chance for each boy or girl to get a
good elementary education, lies at the foundation of our whole
political situation. In every community the poorest citizens, those who
need the schools most, would be deprived of them if they only received
school facilities proportioned to the taxes they paid. This is as true
of one portion of our country as of another. It is as true for the
negro as for the white man. The white man, if he is wise, will decline
to allow the Negroes in a mass to grow to manhood and womanhood without
education. Unquestionably education such as is obtained in our public
schools does not do everything towards making a man a good citizen; but
it does much. The lowest and most brutal criminals, those for instance
who commit the crime of rape, are in the great majority men who have
had either no education or very little; just as they are almost
invariably men who own no property; for the man who puts money by out
of his earnings, like the man who acquires education, is usually lifted
above mere brutal criminality. Of course the best type of education for
the colored man, taken as a whole, is such education as is conferred in
schools like Hampton and Tuskegee; where the boys and girls, the young
men and young women, are trained industrially as well as in the
ordinary public school branches. The graduates of these schools turn
out well in the great majority of cases, and hardly any of them become
criminals, while what little criminality there is never takes the form
of that brutal violence which invites lynch law. Every graduate of
these schools--and for the matter of that every other colored man or
woman--who leads a life so useful and honorable as to win the good will
and respect of those whites whose neighbor he or she is, thereby helps
the whole colored race as it can be helped in no other way; for next to
the negro himself, the man who can do most to help the negro is his
white neighbor who lives near him; and our steady effort should be to
better the relations between the two. Great though the benefit of these
schools has been to their colored pupils and to the colored people, it
may well be questioned whether the benefit, has not been at least as
great to the white people among whom these colored pupils live after
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account