Pastoral Life
The Negro Element in American Life was A. L. DeMond's most important contribution to history. He delivered his oration to members of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on January 1, 1900.
The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where DeMond gave this speech, later became known as the church from which Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement. It is today a National Historic Landmark. The Emancipation Proclamation Association that published the speech was one of several so-named African American social and beneficent organizations in the US South. William Watkins, who offered the resolution to publish the speech, was a contractor and lay leader of the congregation responsible for building much of the church.
Given on the first day of the 20th century, the speech reviews African American history as a map for the American nation’s future. DeMond’s intense national patriotism colors the text’s sentiments and history. He identifies the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation as the twin pillars of the American Republic, the latter constituting fulfillment of the former. (3) DeMond argues that the Emancipation Proclamation enabled African Americans to join in loyal patriotism, and he lauds the participation of black soldiers in the Spanish-American War. (4) He pays tribute to such antislavery figures as Douglass, Garnet, Garrison, Phillips, Beecher, Stowe, Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, and Sumner for voicing a desire for freedom that informed the re-fashioning of the United States. (8) According to DeMond, American history is informed by three basic characters: “the Cavalier, the Puritan and the Negro.” (9) Much of the rest of the text is constituted of panegyrics to the role of African Americans in contributing “all that is noblest and best in American life.” (22) The tone of the speech is heavily patriotic and illustrates a rhetorical incorporation of the antislavery movement into early 20th-century nationalist discourse on freedom and the destiny of the United States.
The first of January was a day of celebration for African-Americans who commemorated the day that President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation Association resolved that this address by the Reverend A. L. DeMond be published in pamphlet form. DeMond emphasizes that African-Americans are fully American, not African, and therefore fully deserving of all the rights of citizens. DeMond describes the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation as:
"two great patriotic, wise and humane state papers…Both were born in days of doubt and darkness. Both were the outcome of injustice overleaping the bounds of right and reason. The one was essential to the fulfilling of the other. Without the Declaration of Independence the nation could not have been born; without the Emancipation Proclamation it could not have lived."
Read more about this topic: Abraham Lincoln De Mond
Famous quotes containing the words pastoral and/or life:
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn’t have the cast-iron grid of a priori coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.”
—Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986)