Our next duty is to furnish the Negro plentifully with opportunities for education.  An ignorant race can have no future, save one of degradation for themselves, and of increasing danger for the nation of which it is a part.  The ignorant Negro must be abolished by the school-house.  Training for the mind, training for the hand, the development and drill of all the powers of life are necessary to make the Negro no more a peril, but a factor of immense value in securing the future prosperity of this country.  We must do far more in this direction than has ever yet been done.  The South is still poor and cannot furnish adequately the means for doing this work as it should be done.  The benevolence of the North must furnish still larger sums for education, that the colored race may be made safe for us and for themselves.

And, last but not least, we must secure to the Negro the full enjoyment of all his rights and privileges in church and State.  He cannot attain the measure of success and usefulness toward which Providence points, if he is to be kept in a state of peonage.  A black man is no better for being black, but he is none the less a man on that account.  The simple thing to be insisted on is that he shall be treated as a man, entitled to the same rights as other men, and protected in his enjoyment of them.  This is no time to relax our emphasis on this point, when the bitterness of the caste spirit is venting itself in violence, and in assertion that white supremacy must be maintained by illegal means if it cannot be by legal.  We maintain that the only safety for the South, and the only way to its large prosperity, is by securing fair play to every man within its borders.  There must not be one law for the white man and another for the black.  There must not be one standard of legal protection in the North and another in the South.  Anarchy in Chicago is not a whit worse nor more dangerous than anarchy in the South, that defies law and rules by the mob in order to gratify race prejudice.  Conspiracy to murder in Chicago is not more outrageous and perilous than the conspiracy of men of one color in the South to get rid of obnoxious men of another color by the shot-gun.  Injustice and wrong will always bring forth a harvest of disaster in any part of the country.  Fair play for every man must be our motto.  We must have no color-line in politics, no color-line in the church; but equal rights for all before the law, and in the church equal privileges of Christian brotherhood.

It is for us to clear the way thus for Providence to carry out its wise designs for this race.  And if we fulfill our part of the work faithfully, what may not this people, educated and regenerated, add of blessing and benefit to our common country.  If out of a race of slaves God in the old time could raise up a Moses, if out of a rude race of sea pirates and robber chiefs, who drank their mead from the skulls of their enemies, He could raise up a Shakespeare, what may He not develop out of this long despised and defrauded people?  Let us furnish freely the channels through which God may work, that in His providence “the weak things of the world may become mighty” for good to our land.