Three Great Negroes
By John E. Bruce, Washington, D. C.
The three greatest Negroes that the race has produced are dead. No three living Negroes fill so much space in books or in men’s thoughts as Toussaint L’Overture, Richard Allen, and Frederick Douglass, and it will be a long while before three Negroes of equal intelligence and ability for leadership and organization will be able to take their places. There are others, but these represent the real greatness of the Negro on two continents, and each man’s work stands out conspicuously for itself. Hayti, the great African Methodist Church, and Negro citizenship in the United States are the magnificent results in part or in whole of the agitations begun by each of these men in his appointed time. The monument to L’Overture’s greatness, generalship, courage, and organizing ability is the black republic which he founded and consecrated with his blood.
Richard Allen’s monument is the great African Methodist Church, with its hundreds of thousands of worshipers, its schools of learning, and its progressive and educated ministers, some of whom can hold a good deal more book learning.
The monument to Frederick Douglass is the new citizen—the Negro citizen, if you please—whose cause he eloquently pleaded in the presence of the great and the powerful, in whose interests he made thousands of sympathetic friends because the Almighty had given him an eloquent tongue and a powerful voice. There are others, but these three stand at the head of the list, and are better known to the world at large than any other three Negroes on earth. What a triumvirate!
L’Overture, Allen, and Douglass—what a mighty combination! Courage, piety, and eloquence. A bronze medallion with the heads of these great Negroes worn near the heart of the young Negroes of this generation might tend to fill their souls with loftier and nobler thoughts and drive them nearer to the race which these men dignified. The immortality of infamy is ours if we fail to produce a Negro in the next generation who will not at least measure up to the standard to which any one of these three immortals not only attained, but kept unsullied and unspotted until the angel of death gathered them unto their fathers, that they might sleep the sleep of the just.