Address
Dogged Determination
A Chance Too Good to Miss
Nannie H. Burroughs calls Black Baptists to a renewed, dogged determination in Christian civilization, moral uplift, self-help, and productive responsibility.
Attribution
The following address is from The Seventh Annual Message of Miss Nannie H. Burroughs to The Woman’s Convention Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., September 8, 1955. The text was supplied from the document titled “Dogged Determination.docx” and has been lightly cleaned for paragraphing and obvious transcription errors.
Miss Nannie H. Burroughs on the condition of Blacks in America in 1955, one year after integration.
The responsibility and concern of this Convention and of all other Negroes–Christian, welfare, educational, and business organizations–for many years to come must be about the Negro masses. It is useless for me to waste time quoting statistics and painting horrifying word pictures about the moral, spiritual, social, economic, and physical conditions of our people in urban and rural America. Too often, it baffles description and beggars belief.
Social workers, hospitals, penal institutions, and court records charge us with mounting sins of every conceivable kind. The Negro Church is not really concerned, and these churches are the last hope of the masses.
The time for a real, well-planned, well-organized, all-inclusive soul, body, home, community-saving campaign is at hand. If something adequate, intensive, courageous, vital, and earnest is not undertaken, the Negro Church of this day is done for. Strong words, but the condition requires stronger love.
A conference on this situation is as necessary as the Four Power Conference at Geneva or the contemplated larger international conference that is coming up before long.
The condition of the masses will not cure itself and neither white people nor laws are going to cure it for us. Home, children, idleness, satisfied ignorance, and crime are our very own problems and we must face and solve them without unnecessary delay. The way must be spelled out by clear-visioned, capable, earnest leaders and sincere workers. We face a social crisis. Ephraim is certainly joined to his idols, but woe to us and to this nation if we let him be.
Have you seen a recent publication by the N.A.A.C.P. Educational Department? It is called Toward Equal Justice. Those clear-seeing, deep-understanding men laid it on the line and portrayed wretched conditions North, South, East, and West–as they are. Only multiply the pictures presented by a million and you have before you our problems and challenges, stark and tragic.
The Negro is not putting forth half as much concrete, constructive, purposeful effort for his own advancement in the fields of education, economics, and social betterment as he can–as he ought and as he must–in order to live and gain a place of respect and influence in American life, if he is to become a part of this life and not continue to exist as a thing apart.
Legal integration and rights that belong to him as a citizen are essential to normal progress, but it will not by any means cure what hurts the Negro in the deeper recesses of his life.
The thing that keeps the Negro behind in this civilization is his lack of full determination to rise and shine. In the last analysis, the only thing that will get the Negro, or any other race for that matter, where it should go in a civilization is the recognition, evaluation, cultivation, and glorification of his divine gifts of mind, hands, and heart.
For plain human rights we must stand up and contend until Shiloh comes, but we cannot even contend effectively unless we make getting everyday sense and an understanding of values our “eternal must.”
In spite of the fact that the race is at the bottom, educationally and economically, and its masses are in the worst social quagmire of any group in any Christian civilization and the end is not yet:
unless men of God in Church and state unite and crusade to challenge and lift these Negro masses "from the body of their death" in slums, ghettos and hovels, democracy and Christianity will be discredited by men who are on a dead hunt for a cure for mass degeneracy among the other under-privileged peoples of the earth.
If the Negro cannot make it out of ignorance, poverty, and low living in America, there is less hope anywhere else on the globe at this time. The hope is in the determination of the Negro himself. It must be a renewed dogged determination. There is far from enough of it on the part of Negroes, everywhere and in all fields.
The first thing for Negroes to learn is that we are attempting to build a Christian civilization here in America.
It must be built out of the very best in every man or it cannot endure. Fundamentally, rejections are not on race, pure and simple. It is on the quality of our basic contribution, and at the same time the quantity of that contribution. Samples are necessary. But a few Negroes excelling or achieving here and there will not do. The question echoes: What is this among so many? We live in an age of mass production. The Negro mass is producing entirely too much waste material.
The time has come for the educated, well-advantaged Negro to become concerned about the mass in his own race and unite in a crusade of redemption and uplift. We are spending practically all our time getting ourselves fixed, running from the masses; using them for exploitation; complaining about what white people are doing to us or what they are not doing for us; breaking into white communities to live and making ourselves secure in ready-made jobs. That is not the cure.
Plain talk, but it is becoming a pattern–too much of it is being done. It is high time that thinking Negroes address themselves unitedly, courageously, and determinedly to building modern, progressive standards in personal, home, community, business, labor, and social life, and make those standards match or excel any already established by anybody.
Keeping up with white people, showing off in what they give us or allow us to use is no achievement. What we produce is now and ever shall be the only cure for race hurts, ills, and handicaps.
Believe it or not, there are millions of white Americans who are glad to help where help is really needed. They will rejoice when Negroes learn the intrinsic value of self-help and get up and prepare and take their God-ordained places among other men and races on pure merit and dogged determination.
White people have built churches, schools, and maintained welfare institutions for us while we do little or nothing for ourselves. Race redemption will require vision, sense, planning, courage, determination, and a will to never give up, but it is the only way up and out for any race–white or black.
To this end, I believe God permitted us to be brought to this goodly country, and the chance to be good for much is too good to miss.