society than those who wielded more direct political and economic power.(3) McCune Smith compared this soft power of the clergy to that which he believed African Americans held, or at least would come to hold. Therefore, they might have played more significant roles in the formation and development of U.S. First, as a social and political activist as well as a devout Christian, McCune Smith observed that the clergy, largely excluded as they were from politics and the acquisition of wealth, nevertheless wielded great spiritual and moral influence. In “Destiny,” McCune Smith expressed some of his observations within the context of analogies he drew from them. culture, especially in the artistic and intellectual realms. This better future would center largely on the outsize role that African Americans would come to play, as they were sure to do, in the development of U.S. society and his political and sociological studies of past civilizations provided him with sources of hope and confidence for a better future for his people. Yet McCune Smith’s observations of certain aspects of U.S. McCune Smith’s predictions may have struck many readers as far too optimistic given the dire situation so many African Americans of his time faced, whether within the United States’ slave system or in the “caste” system it produced.(2) Even when not legally enslaved, nominally free African Americans were routinely denied access to education, lucrative jobs, good housing, transportation, and services, and they were almost universally denied equal political rights and representation. In fine, we are destined to spread over our common country the holy influences of principles, the glorious light of Truth.(1) We are destined to produce the oratory of this Republic for since true oratory can only spring from honest efforts on behalf of the right, such will of necessity rise amid our struggle. We are also destined to write the poetry of the nation for as real poetry gushes forth from minds embued with a lofty perception of the truth, so our faculties, enlarged in the intellectual struggle for liberty, will necessarily become fired with glimpses at the glorious and the true, and will weave their inspiration into song. We have already, even from the depths of slavery, furnished the only music this country has yet produced. From the midst of their shared struggle for freedom from slavery and prejudice, he found hope:įor we are destined to write the literature of this republic, which is still, in letters, a mere province of Great Britain. In the 1843 published version of his 1841 lecture “The Destiny of the People of Color,” African American physician, intellectual, author, classicist, and human rights activist James McCune Smith (1813–1865) reflected on the future of his oppressed people.
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