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- 12 Things The Negro Must Do For Himself by Nannie
Helen Burroughs
- (Circa Early 1900's)
1. The Negro Must Learn To Put First Things
First. The First Things Are: Education; Development of
Character Traits; A Trade and Home Ownership.
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The Negro puts too much of his earning in
clothes, in food, in show and in having what he calls "a good
time." The Dr. Kelly Miller said, "The Negro buys what he
WANTS and begs for what he Needs." Too true!
2. The Negro Must Stop Expecting God and
White Folk To Do For Him What He Can Do For Himself.
3. The Negro Must Keep Himself, His
Children And His Home Clean And Make The Surroundings In Which He
Lives Comfortable and Attractive.
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He must learn to "run his community up"--not
down. We can segregate by law, we integrate only by
living. Civilization is not a matter of race, it is a
matter of standards. Believe it or not--some day, some
race is going to outdo the Anglo-Saxon, completely. It can
be the Negro race, if the Negro gets sense enough.
Civilization goes up and down that way.
4. The Negro Must Learn To Dress More
Appropriately For Work And For Leisure.
5. The Negro Must Make His Religion An
Everyday Practice And Not Just A
Sunday-Go-To-Meeting
Emotional Affair.
6. The Negro Must Highly Resolve To Wipe
Out Mass Ignorance.
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The leaders of the race must teach and inspire
the masses to become eager and determined to improve mentally,
morally and spiritually, and to meet the basic requirements of
good citizenship.
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We should initiate an intensive literacy
campaign in America, as well as in Africa. Ignorance-- satisfied
ignorance--is
a millstone abut the neck of the race. It is democracy's
greatest burden.
Social integration is a relationship attained as a result of the
cultivation of kindred social ideals, interests and standards.
It
is a blending process that requires time, understanding and
kindred purposes to achieve. Likes alone and not laws can
do it.
7.
The Negro Must Stop Charging His Failures Up To His "Color" And To
White People's Attitude.
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The truth of the matter is that good service and conduct will
make senseless race prejudice fade like mist before the rising
sun.
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God never intended that a man's color shall be anything other
than a
badge of distinction.
It is high time that all races were learning that fact.
The Negro must first
QUALIFY
for whatever position he wants. Purpose, initiative,
ingenuity and industry are the keys that all men use to get what
they want. The Negro will have to do the same. He
must make himself a workman who is too skilled not to be wanted,
and too
DEPENDABLE
not to be on the job, according to promise or plan. He
will never become a vital factor in industry until he learns to
put into his work the vitalizing force of initiative, skill and
dependability. He has gone
"RIGHTS"
mad and
"DUTY"
dumb.
8.
The Negro Must Overcome His Bad Job Habits.
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He
must make a brand new reputation for himself in the world of
labor. His bad job habits are absenteeism, funerals to
attend, or a little business to look after. The Negro runs
an off and on business. He also has a bad reputation for
conduct on the job--such as petty quarrelling with other help,
incessant loud talking about nothing; loafing, carelessness, due
to lack of job pride; insolence, gum chewing and--too
often--liquor drinking. Just plain bad job habits!
9.
He Must Improve His Conduct In Public Places.
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Taken as a whole, he is entirely too loud and too ill-mannered.
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There is much talk about wiping out racial segregation and also
much talk about achieving integration.
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Segregation is a physical arrangement by which people are
separated in various services.
-
It
is definitely up to the Negro to wipe out the apparent
justification or excuse for segregation.
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The only effective way to do it is to clean up and keep clean.
By practice, cleanliness will become a habit and habit becomes
character.
10.
The Negro Must Learn How To Operate Business For People--Not For
Negro People, Only.
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To
do business, he will have to remove all typical "earmarks,"
business principles; measure up to accepted standards and meet
stimulating competition, graciously--in fact, he must learn to
welcome competition.
11.
The Average So-Called Educated Negro Will Have To Come Down Out Of
The Air. He Is Too Inflated Over Nothing. He Needs An
Experience Similar To The One That Ezekiel Had--(Ezekiel 3:14-19).
And He Must Do What Ezekiel Did
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Otherwise, through indifference, as to the plight of the masses,
the Negro, who thinks that he has escaped, will lose his own
soul. It will do all leaders good to read Hebrew 13:3, and
the first Thirty-seven Chapters of Ezekiel.
-
A
race transformation itself through its own leaders and its
sensible "common people." A race rises on its own wings,
or is held down by its own weight. True leaders are never
"things apart from the people." They are the masses.
They simply got to the front ahead of them. Their only
business at the front is to inspire to masses by hard work and
noble example and challenge them to "Come on!" Dante
stated a fact when he said, "Show the people the light and they
will find the way!"
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There must arise within the Negro race a leadership that is not
out hunting bargains for itself. A noble example is found
in the men and women of the Negro race, who, in the early days,
laid down their lives for the people. Their invaluable
contributions have not been appraised by the "latter-day
leaders." In many cases, their names would never be
recorded, among the unsung heroes of the world, but for the fact
that white friends have written them there.
"Lord, God of Hosts, Be with us yet."
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The Negro of today does not realize that, but, for these
exhibits A's, that certainly show the innate possibilities of
members of their own race, white people would not have been
moved to make such princely investments in lives and money, as
they have made, for the establishment of schools and for the
on-going of the race.
12.
The Negro Must Stop Forgetting His Friends. "Remember."
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Read Deuteronomy 24:18. Deuteronomy rings the big bell of
gratitude. Why? Because an ingrate is an abomination
in the sight of God. God is constantly telling us that
"I
the Lord thy God delivered you"--through
human instrumentalities.
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The American Negro has had and still has friends--in the North
and in the South. These friends not only pray, speak,
write, influence others, but make unbelievable, unpublished
sacrifices and contributions for the advancement of the
race--for their brothers in bonds.
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The noblest thing that the Negro can do is to so live and labor
that these benefactors will not have given in vain. The
Negro must make his heart warm with gratitude, his lips sweet
with thanks and his heart and mind resolute with purpose to
justify the sacrifices and stand on his feet and go forward--"God
is no respector of persons. In every nation, he that
feareth him and worketh righteousness is"
sure to win out. Get to work! That's the answer to
everything that hurts us. We talk too much about nothing
instead of redeeming the time by working.
R-E-M-E-M-B-E-R
Note:
Many of you have copied and posted this on your web site.
We would appreciate proper attribution.
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- Nannie H. Burroughs
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Things The Negro Must Do To Improve Himself,
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- Nannie Helen Burroughs
- By Rotograph
Co., New York City, 1909.
- Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division
Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961) was an educator,
orator, religious leader and businesswoman who moved to Washington,
D.C., as a young woman to take advantage of the city's superior
educational opportunities. While living in Washington she
decided to open a school for African American girls to prepare them
for a productive adult life. Burroughs was an active member of her
church, where she organized a women's club that conducted evening
classes in useful skills such as typewriting, bookkeeping, cooking,
and sewing. Her responsibilities within the church increased
when she became secretary of the Women's Auxiliary of the National
Baptist Convention, which supported missionary work and educational
societies in Baptist churches throughout the nation. Burroughs's
dream lifelong dream was realized when she opened the National
Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C., in 1909.
Note: The 12 Things The Negro Must Do For
Himself was a booklet sold in the early 1900's. The retail
price for this booklet was 10 cents. We learned about the book
from Gary Johnson's grandmother who gave him
the book. Many attempts have been
made to find the booklet. As far as we know it is out of
print. There is a wealth of information about
Nannie Helen Burroughs on
the Internet. To learn more about her, check your favorite
search engine and share the knowledge. A good site to visit is
www.nhburroughs.org.
G. J.
Introduction to How the
Underground Railroad Worked
A slave in 1850 didn't have many choices in life. He could
stay on his master's plantation, resigning himself to a life of
hard labor, often brutal physical punishment and possibly a
broken family as he watched his loved ones be sold away. Not all
slaves had the same life, but this was what he might expect if
he remained in bondage.
Or he could run away.
Escaping was a very uncertain prospect. The master would
either hunt the slave himself or send brutal slave hunters to
track him down. If caught, not only did the runaway face almost
certain death, but the rest of the slaves on his plantation were
often witness to his execution and were punished themselves.
And life on the run was difficult, to say the least. The
fugitive had to be wary of everyone -- strangers could recognize
him as a slave and turn him in, and other slaves could rat him
out to curry favor with their masters. He would have to travel
at night, following the North Star when the weather was clear
and sleeping in hay lofts and caves during the day. He might get
some help from people along the way, but anyone who was kind to
him was also suspect.
If the runaway did make it to a Northern state, there were
still perils. Plenty of people, white and black, wanted the
reward money they could receive for turning him in, and the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 (which was made even harsher in 1850)
meant that if his master could find him, he could bring his
"property" back South as a slave again -- if the master didn't
kill him, that is. So a runaway's best hope was to get to
Canada.
With all the danger, there was little chance of success. But
if he did make it ... freedom.
The word was too much for many slaves even to contemplate,
much less attempt. But according to at least one estimate,
during the 1800s, more than 100,000 slaves would take their
chances to start a new life. The Underground Railroad was their
ticket to freedom [source:
Freedom Center].
Click here to read the entire article.
Was Bill Cosby Right?
Three years after
Bill Cosby addressed the NAACP about his views on the state of
Black America the debate rages on.
Click here
to listen to Bill Cosby's classic
"Call To Action"
speech at the 2004
Address at
the NAACP on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education
courtesy
American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank.
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Click Here To
Visit Our Martin Luther King, Jr. Page
If The Negro Would Try
"The Negro race
has never tried to do very much for itself. The race has great
possibilities. Properly awakened, the Negro can do the
so-called impossible."
Carter G.
Woodson
"A race which cannot save its earnings, which
spends all it makes and goes in debt when it is sick, can never rise
in the scale of civilization, no matter under what laws it may
chance to be.
If the time shall ever come when we shall
possess in the colored people of the United States, a class of men
noted for enterprise, industry, economy and success, we shall no
longer have trouble in the matter of civil and political rights."
--Fredrick Douglass
Work To Excel
I think if I were a baker I would not be
content with being a good baker, nor even a better baker than my
neighbor. I would endeavor to bake bread like Michael Angelo
painted pictures, like Thorwaldson chiseled statuary, or like James
Oliver molded plows. It would be my aim to put into this trade
a factor from which posterity could draw economical and social
betterment.
I would leaven my bread with the ambition of
my soul, and crust my pastry with the seasonable joy of supreme
effort profitability employed.
It seems to me the dough bin holds
possibilities
for a MAN. Let him stand forth.
--Elbert Hubbard
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