832

martyred in making responses to the unvoiced appeals. It demands skill to lead
to the performance of difficult tasks by the learners in a way to lead to their repeti-
tion when the compulsion is removed. It demands patience to make the teacher
tolerant of the sham, the trickery and the indolence in the face of the great good
of the offerings and the great rewards awaiting those who appropriate them. It
demands hope to continue laboring in the face of discouragement at home and
contempt abroad. It demands personality to be expended in a thousand avenues of
expression, almost beyond the gift to ordinary mortals. It is the return in clear-
headed, upright, self-supporting, refined, honest, respectful, tolerant, ambitious,
happy, useful African-American manhood and womanhood, which is about the
keenest reward a man or woman can get upon this earth of toil.

Such must have been the feeling which lured General Armstrong to give his
life for Hampton. Such is no doubt the feeling which tunes the persuasive voice
of the great leader at Tuskegee, and such is the emotional return to every
man of any race who sees a lowly and backward people slowly rising as a result
of his efforts, sacrifices, or munificence. That feeling inspired the Abolitionists. It
fired Peabody, Myrtilla Miner, and Dr. Mayo. It shows itself in the labors of Mr.
Ogden, and repays Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller for the stings of the mal-
contents.

"I came not to be ministered unto, but to minister" is in thought and deed the
attitude of each helper in such work. The teachers of children of African-American
parentage must be Christians, for the children are far and away from what they
must be and will be to help in the work of making America what is is rapidly
becoming in the development of nations.

It is not so much what the children shall be taught, as it is the power, truthful-
ness, and applicability of the teaching coupled with the unconscious influences of the
character of the teachers which will bring the children into the whole estate of Amer-
ican citizenship of individual usefulness and social service.

To achieve the great end which the teachers of African-American children desire,
it is necessary to have the teachers so trained that they can isolate and treat such
a special problem as the condition of the African-American child. Such teachers
must be trained in Christian homes, by correct habits of early life, by a schooling
which makes no compromise with truth, but insists upon a fact-mastery equivalent
to a record of "Good;" by selection from the whole number which enters the post-
adolescent grades of school systems, by regular and careful elimination of the
unfit, by intensive study of race history, during the pre-adolescent period, by training
for skill in the production of some useful thing to insure independence, by familiarity
with the business methods of the times, by travel, by the inculcation of a rational
pride of race untarnished by foolish assumption of equality, by inculcation of the
scientific habit of mind for the treatment of racial conditions, by courage, persist-
ence, and an unfaltering trust in the outcome of the tendency of mankind to a
more perfect manhood and womanhood, a more perfect social state.

The publication of the Occasional Papers," and the performance of other special
work in the Science Department have been greatly facilitated by the kind assistance of
Mr. C. F. NORMENT
Mr. E. J. STELLWAGEN
Mr. W. B. HIBBS
Dr. JAMES F. MITCHELL
Dr. GEO. W. CABANISS
Dr. CHAS. H. MARSHALL
Rev. M. W. CLAIR
Miss M. E. GIBBS
Miss BLENIE BRUCE
Miss K. U. ALEXANDER
Mr. BERNARD KEY
Dr. LUCY E. MOTEN
Dr. C. W. CHILDS
Mr. NAT. L. GUY
Mr. JOHN BUTLER

Sincerely,

June, 1909

CHARLES M. THOMAS
1631 O Street N. W.