The Library of Congress
Two Unreconciled Strivings

African American baseball players of Morris Brown College, with boy and another man standing at door, Atlanta, Georgia Family

"The annual address delivered before the faculty, students and friends of Claflin University and the Claflin College of Agriculture and Mechanical institute, May 22nd, 1889, Orangeburg, S.C.: by Rt. Rev. Benjamin William Arnett..."

Benjamin William Arnett (1838-1906), a prominent cleric and later the AME bishop of South Carolina and Georgia, offers African-Americans a strategy for escaping the hostility of their environment.

We must move or die. We must be re-planted, we cannot mature in a hot-house. If you want to have fully developed fruit, you have to move them out of the nursery and plant them in the orchard, where they will have plenty of room, light and heat. So we must go and occupy the virgin soil of the West, we must go and stake off our claim, cut down the trees, burn the brush, dig up the stumps, make the fence to protect it, and then wait for the harvest which will follow as a reward for work, and faith in the ground and God.

Get up and Go? Go, take your family with you. Go as one of the pioneer's and you will have a pioneers reward. It will not affect the farming interest of the State to have some of the labor go out. It will give those that remain more work and better wages. It will help those that remain to take better care of their families, to save money, and to be more comfortable while living; for where there is one hoe or shovel that wants a hand to work it, and twenty hands are sent out after it...

Full text (Library of Congress/Daniel A.P. Murray Pamphlet Collection):

Overview Family Work Play Faith Education Race Violence
The Library of Congress | American Memory Contact us
Last updated 10/01/2002