The broad ax. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1895-19??, 1916-09-16
Address of DR.. Robert
Russo Motion, Principal
of Tuskegee Institute,
Alabama, Before the
National Baptist Con-
vention, Savannah, Ga.
September 8, 1916

chance to get work, to buy land, to
build decent homes, and while the
chance for education in many respects
is still meager, that too is increasing
at an encouraging rate in many places
in the South, more perhaps in senti-
ment than in actual accomplishment,
but no less real and important. We
can live under our own vine and fig
tree and can worship God according to
the dictates of our own conscience.
I do not think it is amiss either for
me to call your attention to the fact
that Just now opportunities along in
dustrial lines were never more favor
able than today. Negroes are being
called upon as never before for service
along almost all lines of industrial en-
deavor. Avenues of industry are open
ing up to him that have been closed for
many years and as leaders we owe it to
ourselves for selfish reasons, if for no
other, to see to it that these hewers
of wood, drawers of water in our race,
the men and women who earn their
bread in the sweat of their faces, the
backbone and sinew of the Negro race,
and of other races are encouraged and
inspired, not only to secure the posi-
tions which they are now almost being
persuaded to take, but we should en-
courage them to hold them by loyal and
faithful service, by politeness and
promptness, by punctuality and in
dustry. For when the great war in
Europe is over, there will probably be
flocking to this country such as We
have never before known, and these
White men from Southern Europe and
Northern Europe and even from Eng
land and Germany will come here and
take the jobs of our own race here in
the South; and while Southern White
men would naturally prefer the Negro,
whom they know and understand, and
who knows and understands them,-if
we are inefficient and selfish, careless
and shiftless-as many of our race are
they will be forced to accept the
services of foreign race and woe be
unto the Negro when that day comes
You and 1 must use every opportun-
ity, also, to deepen feeling in the
methods of DR.. Washington, and should
strive in every reasonable way to
deepen the Negroes respect for himself
along with respect for other selves as
we'll We should encourage him to be-
lieve in his community and in the peo-
pie of his community and to be loyal
to his community, white even as black.
Do not cut him loose from his moor
ings. There is hope for a man when
he believes in his mother and his home
and his community. There is hope for
race when it believes in its COM
munity, its city, its county, its State
when it believes in its nation. This
is our country and if we do not pos
sess as much of it as we would like, we
have ourselves to blame more than any
body else.
The forces of nature are and have
been and always will be absolutely
color blind The. wind and the wave
and the heat and steam and electricity
are absolutely blind forces and see no
race distinction and draw no color line.
The earth will yield as abundantly to
the skill of black man as to a white
man and the world 3 market cares moth
ing about the shade of the hand that
produced the neutrality-suspicious. of
cotton, corn, wheat or what not. 1t
does insist that it shall be up to the
worlds requirements.
A Tuskegee student threw himself
in front of a rushing automobile and
saved the life of an innocent White
child and thereby received Carnegie
Hero medal and did not stop to think
about his own life or whether the child
was White or Colored. 1t was an in
nocent human soul that was about to
have her life crushed out.
The question, my friends, in the last
analysis is not whether we are Baptists
or Methodists, whether rich or poor,
whether black or white-the question
is, we are all children of God and we
should throw ourselves, as we have
never done it before, in front of ignor.
ance, and ineficiency; in front of
criminality and in all that tends to
lower, to hinder and degrade our race
and our country and try and save
everyone; and we, too, may be per
mitted to have our names recorded
among those who by faith endured as
seeing Him who is invisible.