Excerpt from Significance of Liberia: An Address Delivered in the Senate, 20th May, 1906

I am free to say that as Africans in the land of our fathers, hence our own land, with the advantages gained in slavery, we have special duties and glorious privileges. It is not our part to be looking backward across the ocean, but forward into the great continent, our ancestral home. Our brethren in foreign lands are striving by all possible unnatural means to become White, While we are looking eastward and are determined to remain natural.

Let us not take for granted what we have heard with our ears, and our masters have told us but let us search for ourselves, as the Bereans did, and see whether these things are so; search both in the Book Of Revelations and in the vast and fruitful book of nature around us.

It is our part to be learning new things which are not recorded in books, and which without us the world cannot learn; therefore, our thinking friends abroad think it such a pity that Liberians, as Africans, in an independent State in Africa, should be content to follow and imitate them on all lines, religious, soclal' and industrial. It is in our power, they think (and rightly too), to discover fresh interests for mankind new avenues, not only Of material, but Of religious, social and intellectual progress. This is too true. In the first place we should make new friends, and renew forgotten acquaintances with our aboriginal friends. We should study their laws and customs, and convey the meaning of them to the outside world. This is what our best friends expect Of us. This is what Liberia was founded for, with many prayers and tears and consecrated gifts, as we are reminded in the lecture. But how can we fulfil these expectations if we are for ever looking backward to the land of our three hundred years' bondage 7 The world gains by difference, not by servile imitation.

In the atmosphere in which we were brought up it requires an effort to say, Thank God, I am Black. Among our relatives' in the interior that feeling is as natural and spontaneous as it is to the nightingale to sing, or the cock to crow. It is more than negative: not merely gratitude that they are not White men, but gratitude that they are Black men. In our interior, Blackie or Darkie -a term so Offensive to our brethren in America - 4s Often a pet name for children. Travelling along an Interior road some years ago with a young friend, we met a fine-looking native woman, who stopped and, looking steadily at us, remarked (not supposing that we understood her language), These people are as pretty as we are. This shews that we have a healthy, sound, trust worthy patriotism and race pride behind us, which we must utilise.

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