PATRONIZE YOUR OWN

"With all his fickleness, the Frenchman never forgets to find out and patronize his own people. Italians flock together and stand by each other, right or wrong. The Chinese are clannish, and stick by one another. The Caucasian race is the foremost in the world in everything that pertains to advanced civilization,--simply owing to the fact that an Englishman never passes the door of a countryman to patronize another race ; and a Yankee is a Yankee all the days of his life, and will never desert his colors. But where is the Negro? "A gentlemanly and well-informed colored man came to me a few days since, wishing to impart to me some important information, and he commenced by saying, 'Now, Doctor, what I am going to tell you, you may rely on its being true, because I got it from a white man--no nigger told me this.'... "It is the misfortune of our race that the impression prevails that 'one nigger is good as another.' Now this is a great error; there are colored men in the country as far ahead of others of their own race as Webster and Sumner were superior to the average white man. "Then again we have no confidence in each other. We consider the goods from the store of a white man necessarily better than can be purchased from a colored man. "No man ever succeeded who lacked confidence in himself. No race ever did or ever will prosper or make a respectable history which has no confidence in its own nationality. "Those who do not appreciate their own people will not be appreciated by other people.... "Generations of oppression have done their work too thoroughly to have its traces wiped out in a dozen years. The race must be educated out of the ignorance in which it at present dwells, and be lifted to a new level with other races. Colored lawyers, doctors, artisans , and mechanics, starve for patronage, while the Negro is begging the white man to do his work.... "The great achievements of scientific men could not have been made practical by individual effort. The great works of genius could never have benefited the world , had those who composed them been mean and selfish. All great and useful enterprises have succeeded through the influence and energy of numbers. "I would not have it thought that all colored men are to be bought by the white man's smiles, or to be frightened by intimidation. Far from it. In all the Southern states we have some of the noblest specimens of mankind , --men of genius, refinement , courage, and liberality, ready to do and to die for the race." P. 838-841, "My Southern Home," WILLIAM WELLS BROWN (2014)