best to send us there. Now, my friends, it does not seem to me that
there is any question about it so far as we are concerned. The whites
may go if they want to, but we are not going to budge! So long as this
is a free country we are going to stay here; it satisfies us. It seems
to me God has so settled it.

The question is not, what are you going to do with the colored man, but
what are you going to do for him? A great deal has been done, and it has
been said that more has been done for the Negroes than for any other
people. That is true: and the Negro has done more in these last
twenty-five years than any other people on whom money and time and labor
has been expended. The American Missionary Association found out long
ago what the Negro problem was. They established schools and sent
teachers among us, and when they came to us, they came at once,
assuming--not as Senator Eustis has done, that the Negroes have an
inherent sense of inferiority, and that they should take an assigned
place; not as Governor Lee has insisted, that the all-important thing
for the white man to do is to keep the Negro down; and not as Senator
Gibbs of Georgia, who a few weeks ago insisted that the white people are
in imminent peril, and even went so far as to bring a bill before the
Legislature as to whether the Negroes should be driven out of that
State. That is not the way these teachers have come down to us. They
have assumed that we are as capable as other people, that we have the
same needs; and because they have come to us with this assumption to
begin with, because they have received us in this way, we have made the
progress that we have.

Now, of all things that are most needed to be done for us, we need a
good theological seminary in the South, where the ministry can be
educated among us. It is only an elevated Christian citizenship that