FREDERICK DOUGLASS: A SOUL MADE MANIFEST

‎"Our educational philosophers are ransacking their brains to prescribe wise curricula of study for colored youth. There is not so much need of that which gives information to the mind or cunning to the fingers as that which touches the soul and quickens the spirit. There must be first aroused dormant consciousness of manhood with its inalienable rights, privileges, and dignity. The letter killeth, the spirit maketh alive. The "Columbian Orator" contributed more to arousing the manhood of Mr. Douglass than all the traditional knowledge of all the schools. Of what avail is mastery of all branches of technical and refined knowledge unless it touches the hidden springs of manhood? The value of any curriculum of study for a suppressed class that is not pregnant with moral energy, and that does not make insistent and incessant appeal to the half-conscious manhood within is seriously questionable. The revelation to a young man of the dignity, I had almost said the divinity, of his own selfhood is worth more to him in the development of character and power than all the knowledge in all the deluxe volumes in the gilded Carnegie libraries.

"In the third place, Negro youth should study Mr. Douglass as a model of manly courage. In order to acquire a clear conception of principles let us discriminate sharply in the use of terms. Courage is that quality that enables one to encounter danger and difficulties with firmness and resolution of spirit. It is the swell of the soul which meets outward pressure with inner resistance. Fortitude, on the other hand, is the capacity to endure, the ability to suffer and be strong. It is courage in the passive voice. True courage sets up an ideal and posits a purpose; it calculates the costs and is economic of means, though never faltering in determination to reach that end. Bravery is mere physical daring in the presence of danger, and responds to temporary physical and mental excitation. He who is eager to fight every evil which God allows to exist in society does not display rational courage. Even our Savior selected the evils against which he waged war. The caged eagle which beats its wings into insensibility against the iron bars of its prison house is accounted a foolish bird. On the other hand, 'the linnet void of noble rage' has gained the everlasting seal of poetic disapproval. It is not genuine courage to go through the world like the knight in the tale with sword in hand and challenges on his lips to offer mortal combat to every windmill of opposition."

P.217-218, Race Adjustment: essays on the Negro in America, "Frederick Douglass," by Kelly Miller (1909)