Part 18 (1/2)
On the convention night Saint Marks was crowded with young colored people, some of whom came from places a hundred miles away. They were badged and pennanted quite in the fas.h.i.+on to which J.W. was accustomed.
But for their color, and, to be frank, for a little more restraint and thoughtfulness in their really unusual singing, they were just young Methodists at a convention, not different from Caucasian Methodists of the same age.
When J.W.'s turn came to speak, the chairman introduced him in the fewest possible words, but with the courtesy which belongs to self-respect, saying, ”Mr. Farwell will make the delegates welcome in the name of the First Church Epworthians.”
And he did. He had his notes, pretty full ones, to which he made frequent references, but the quality in his speech which drew the convention's cheers was its frank and natural simplicity.
”I would have begged off from this duty, if I could,” he began, ”but I knew from the moment I was asked that I had no decent excuse. But I knew so little of what I ought to say that it was necessary for me to dig, just as I used to do at school.”
The result of my digging is that I know now and I want you to know that I know, why First Church young people should join in welcoming you to Delafield. Some of them don't know yet, any more than I did ten days ago; but I intend to enlighten them the first chance I get.
We First Church Epworthians might welcome you for many reasons, but I have decided to stick to two, because, as I have said, I have just been learning something about them.
We welcome you, then, because you represent the most eager hunger for complete education that exists in America to-day, unless our new Hebrew citizens can match it. No others can. The record of our church's schools for your race prove that it simply is not possible to keep the Negro youth out of school. They will walk further, eat less, work harder, and stay longer to get an education than for anything else in the world.
Not so many days ago I ignorantly thought that the 'three R's' was all that ought to be offered, partly because the need is so great. I hope you will forgive me that thought, when I tell you that now I know what ignorance it revealed in me. The great need is the strongest argument for the highest education. Because of your great numbers, and because of your ever intenser racial self-respect, the Negro must educate the Negro, be physician for the Negro, preach to the Negro, nurse the Negro, lead the Negro in all his upward effort. Otherwise these things will be done badly, or patronizingly, or not at all.
But if you are to do your own educational work, your educators must be fully equipped. It is not possible to send the whole race to college, but it is possible to send college-trained youth to the race. For this reason our church has established normal schools, colleges of liberal arts, professional schools, homes for college girls, so that the coming leaders of your people may have access to the best the world offers in science and literature, in medicine and law, in business and religion.
You will not mistake my purpose, I am sure, in saying that you know better than we can guess how your people, through no fault of theirs, have been long in bondage to the unskilled hand, the unawakened mind, and the uninspired heart. But it is more and more an unwilling bondage.
And our church, your church, has set up these schools and these training homes I have mentioned, as though she were saying, in the words of one of your own wonderful songs, 'Let my people go!' And the results are coming. Your two bishops, one in the South and one in Africa, your leaders in the church's highest councils, your educators, your far-seeing business men, your great preachers, are part of the answer to your church's pa.s.sion to give full freedom to all her people.
For you are _her_ people, the people of the Christian Church; we are all G.o.d's people. It seems to me that just now G.o.d is interested in bringing to every race in the world the chance of liberty for hand and head and heart. G.o.d has greater things for us all to do than we can now understand, but all his purposes must wait on our getting free from everything that would defeat our work.
Our First-Church young people welcome you because with all else you represent a great purpose to make religion intelligent. You know, as we do, that piety to be vital must be mixed with sound learning. You have the missionary spirit, which never thrives in an atmosphere of resistance to education. You are 'fellow Christians,' fellow workers. We are sharers with you in personal devotion to our Lord, and in the common purpose to make him Master of all life.
And, finally, let me say it bluntly, we welcome you because we believe in your pride of race, and honor it in you as we honor it in our fellow citizens of other races. They and you have some things in common, but you will not misunderstand me when I congratulate you on what is peculiar to you. You have been fully Americanized for more generations than most other Americans. You have no need to strive after the American spirit. I have a friend of Greek birth, who thinks pridefully back to the Golden Age of Greece, and I envy him his glorying. But your pride of race, turning away from the unhappy past, sees your Golden Age in the days to come, not in the dim yesterdays. You are the makers, not the inheritors, of a great destiny.
”For that n.o.ble future which is to be yours in our common America, you do well to hold as above price the purity and strength of your racial life. Better than we of Caucasian stock, you know that only so may all the values be fully realized which are to be Africa's contribution to the spiritual wealth of America and the world.”
There was a moment of silence, for the implications of the last sentence were not as plain as they might have been. But when the audience caught J.W.'s somewhat daring appeal to its racial self-respect it broke into such cheers as are not given to the polite phraser of conventional commonplaces.
CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
The full record of J.W.'s commercial career must he left to some other chronicler, but an occasional reference to it cannot be omitted from these pages.
Pastor Drury's brother Albert, a Saint Louis business man who knew the old city by the Mississippi from the levees to the University, was a citizen who loved his city so well that he did not need to join a Boosters' Club to prove it. The two Drurys saw each other, as both averred, all too seldom. On the infrequent occasions when they met, as, for instance, during a certain church federation gathering which had brought the minister down to Saint Louis from Delafield, their ”visiting” was a joyous thing to see.
Lounging in the City Club one day after lunch, with every other subject of common interest at least touched on, Brother Albert turned to Brother Walter: ”And how goes the church and parish of Delafield? You told me long ago that you wanted to stay there ten years; it's more than eight now. Does the ten-year mark yet stand?”
”Yes, Al., it still stands, if nothing should interfere,” said Walter.
He had never told his brother the reason back of that ten-year mark, and he was not ready, even yet, for that. Of late he had taken to wondering when and how the Experiment would come to its crisis. He wanted some help just now, and here might be an opening. So he went on, ”I've been working away at several special jobs, as you know I like to do, and one of them has a good deal to do with a young fellow named Farwell, John Wesley Farwell, Jr., who'll be the mainstay of the best hardware store in Delafield before long if he sticks to it. Everybody calls him 'J.W.,'
and he's the sort of boy that has always interested me, he's so 'average,'” He paused; his thoughts busy with the Experiment.
”Well,” his brother broke in, after a moment, ”what's this young John Wesley Methodist been doing?”
”It isn't altogether what he has been doing, but it's what I'd like to see him get a chance to do,” explained the preacher. ”He's tied to the store and to Delafield, so far, and I've reasons for wanting him to see some parts of this country he'll never see from Main Street in our town.”