And he did.  He had his notes, pretty full ones, to which he made frequent references, but the quality in his speech which drew the convention’s cheers was its frank and natural simplicity.

“I would have begged off from this duty, if I could,” he began, “but I knew from the moment I was asked that I had no decent excuse.  But I knew so little of what I ought to say that it was necessary for me to dig, just as I used to do at school.”

The result of my digging is that I know now and I want you to know that I know, why First Church young people should join in welcoming you to Delafield.  Some of them don’t know yet, any more than I did ten days ago; but I intend to enlighten them the first chance I get.

We First Church Epworthians might welcome you for many reasons, but I have decided to stick to two, because, as I have said, I have just been learning something about them.

We welcome you, then, because you represent the most eager hunger for complete education that exists in America to-day, unless our new Hebrew citizens can match it.  No others can.  The record of our church’s schools for your race prove that it simply is not possible to keep the Negro youth out of school.  They will walk further, eat less, work harder, and stay longer to get an education than for anything else in the world.

Not so many days ago I ignorantly thought that the ‘three R’s’ was all that ought to be offered, partly because the need is so great.  I hope you will forgive me that thought, when I tell you that now I know what ignorance it revealed in me.  The great need is the strongest argument for the highest education.  Because of your great numbers, and because of your ever intenser racial self-respect, the Negro must educate the Negro, be physician for the Negro, preach to the Negro, nurse the Negro, lead the Negro in all his upward effort.  Otherwise these things will be done badly, or patronizingly, or not at all.

But if you are to do your own educational work, your educators must be fully equipped.  It is not possible to send the whole race to college, but it is possible to send college-trained youth to the race.  For this reason our church has established normal schools, colleges of liberal arts, professional schools, homes for college girls, so that the coming leaders of your people may have access to the best the world offers in science and literature, in medicine and law, in business and religion.

You will not mistake my purpose, I am sure, in saying that you know better than we can guess how your people, through no fault of theirs, have been long in bondage to the unskilled hand, the unawakened mind, and the uninspired heart.  But it is more and more an unwilling bondage.

And our church, your church, has set up these schools and these training homes I have mentioned, as though she were saying, in the words of one of your own wonderful songs, ‘Let my people go!’ And the results are coming.  Your two bishops, one in the South and one in Africa, your leaders in the church’s highest councils, your educators, your far-seeing business men, your great preachers, are part of the answer to your church’s passion to give full freedom to all her people.