Page:Natalie Curtis - Negro Folk-Songs Book 1.djvu/9

 O RIDE ON, JESUS

"O Ride on, Jesus, Ride on, conquerin' King!"

The recording of this song is dedicated to the memory of GENERAL SAMUEL CHAPMAN ARMSTRONG, Founder of Hampton Institute

SHORTLY after the Civil War, when the South was flooded with the pitiful and penniless freedmen, and when the increasing Westward migration of white settlers had meant the clash of troops with the red men and the bringing of Indian prisoners to Florida, it was General Armstrong who took the first practical steps toward answering the question of what was to be done with the two dark-skinned races, both of them ignorant and helpless — ex-slaves, and Government "wards." With prophetic insight, Armstrong saw that Negroes and Indians must first of all be taught to stand on their own feet, and to do this they must learn how to work, and how to support themselves by work. To him the thing to be done was plain : so to train selected youth of the two races that they could become leaders of their people.

To-day, when manual and industrial training as a part of general education is no longer an experiment, it is difficult to realize that at the time General Armstrong advocated it, the idea was without successful precedent in the United States. Armstrong's principles, the inter-training of "hand, head and heart," the teaching of "respect for labor," the correlation of study in the classrooms with farming, home-making and trades — these were wholly new theories of education, and they were greeted with skepticism and with wide predictions of failure. That Armstrong succeeded in holding high the torch of this illuminative idea in the early dark days of opposition was due not alone to the intense conviction that burned in his own soul; that idea was bound to triumph because of its truth and expediency and because it was based on the sound principle of what Armstrong called "sanctified common-sense." The real victory of Hampton is the fitting of men and women for life, mentally and morally as well as industrially. And as the visitor to the school watches the noontide daily drill of the students on the wide lawns that slope to the water's edge, as he listens to the band played by boys black and copper-colored, and sees the stars and stripes flutter in the breeze upborne by loyal black hands, he is moved with a sense of reverence for the heroic genius of Armstrong; for these stalwart ranks of dark-skinned, self-respecting American manhood and womanhood that march past with ringing step and steady eyes are those who have "come up out of deep darkness and wrong," the children of slaves and so-called savages, transformed in a generation.