African Americans; African Americans -- Politics and government -- 20th century; African Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964
Add to all this the facts that the Negro has his representatives in the
commercial world: McCoy and Granville T. Woods, inventors; in the
agricultural world with J.H. Groves, the potato king of Kansas, who last
year shipped from his own railway siding seventy-two thousand five hundred
bushels of potatoes alone; in the military, with Capt. Charles A. Young, a
West Pointer, now stationed at the Presidio; that in medicine, he
possesses in Daniel H. Williams, of Chicago, one of the really great
surgeons of the country; that Edward H. Morris, a black man, is one of the
most brilliant lawyers at the brilliant Cook County bar; that in every
walk of life he has men and women who stand for something definite and
concrete, and it seems to me that there can be little doubt that the race
problem will gradually solve itself.
I have spoken of "men and women," and indeed the women must not be
forgotten, for to them the men look for much of the inspiration and
impulse that drives them forward to success. Mrs. Mary Church Terrell
upon the platform speaking for Negro womanhood and Miss Sarah Brown, her
direct opposite, a little woman sitting up in her aerie above a noisy New
York street, stand for the very best that there is in our mothers, wives
and sisters. The one fully in the public eye, with learning and eloquence,
telling the hopes and fears of her kind; the other in suffering and
retirement, with her knowledge of the human heart and her gentleness
inspiring all who meet her to better and nobler lives. They are both doing
their work bravely and grandly. But when the unitiate ask who is "la
Petite Reine," we think of the quiet little woman in a New York fifth
floor back and are silent.
She is a patron of all our literature and art and we have both. Whether it
is a new song by Will Marion Cook or a new book by DuBois or Chestnut,
than whom no one has ever told the life of the Negro more accurately and
convincingly, she knows it and has a kindly word of praise or
encouragement.
In looking over the field for such an article as this, one just begins to
realize how many Negroes are representative of something, and now it seems
that in closing no better names could be chosen than those of the two
Tanners.
From time immemorial, Religion and Art have gone together, but it remained
for us to place them in the persons of these two men, in the relation of
father and son. Bishop Benj. Tucker Tanner, of the A.M.E. Church, is not
only a theologian and a priest, he is a dignified, polished man of the
higher world and a poet. He has succeeded because he was prepared for
success. As to his writings, he will, perhaps, think most highly of "His
Apology For African Methodism;" but some of us, while respecting this,
will turn from it to the poems and hymns that have sung themselves out of
his gentle heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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