Fire!! Are We True to the Memory of Joseph C. Price?
Those who have spent their time collecting a million dollars have been too busy to earn it, while those who have spent their time earing a million dollars have been too busy to collect it. This principle can be applied to the life and work of the immortal founder of Livingstone College, Joseph C. Price. In the same vein, Mr. Price replied to President Grover Cleveland who offered him the ministership to Liberia, saying, “I must thank you for the honor you offer me, but I think I can do more good for my people here in Salisbury.”
One of the graduates of the school, the late Max Whitehead, expresses this sentiment in the epigram that has become proverbial, imputing to Dr. Price the words: “I have no time to get money, my people have need of me.” It is the old thought in new clothing.
The benefactors of society have been the men and women who lived for others. Altruistic service, denying self of the emoluments that most men crave and corner when they can, have been the distinguishing and inspiring qualities by which benefactors have raised themselves unto immortal fame and who have the everlasting gratitude of posterity. They were million dollar men but somebody else collected their worth and wages.
Dr. Price was one of these self-denying heroes. From a boy the vastness of politics was open before him, and persuasive inducements from every direction were made by his friends, who sought to coerce him into what they regarded a larger service to his race for his superb talent and magnificent personality. In North Carolina a movement started to send him to Congress at the time and in the section of the state where colored men easily were elected to that position. Price was the most popular man that North Carolina ever produced in the race and there only was one other man his equal in popularity in the entire state. He was the late Civil War Governor and Senator Zebulon Vance. He refused this also.
He was invited to lecture Chautauqua but refused to make any speech or to anywhere that he could not help to advance the cause of his people in, furthering the work to which he had consecrated his life, the building of Livingstone College.
Within the Church he was many times hindered, but he was never discouraged, and at New Bern and Pittsburgh General Conferences he was forced to take a stand against organized powers in his own beloved Zion in order to keep the work at Livingstone advancing and to hold his hand upon the helm. He would have gone to the top had he conducted an independent school, or connected himself with some racewide movement as other leaders have done, but he found his pedestal of greatness by way of Livingstone and Zion, and died a poor man, when he might have been independent in this world’s goods.
No one else ever made such sacrifices for Livingstone College, for possibly no one else who has been connected with the institution has been capable of such sacrifices as he. Dr. W.H. Goler and Dr. E. Moore were close seconds to him, and several lady teachers also.
Bishop J.W. Hood was an altruistic old churchman and made many sacrifices also for our beloved Zion and for his race in the south, but we repeat, as relates to Livingstone College and the education of the race in which he lead forward the A.M.E. Zion Church in contributing by the founding of Livingstone and organizing the cause of education, Dr. Joseph C. Price has been the chief benefactor in all of the 127 years of the denomination.
The 10th of February is the Price anniversary. Sixty-nine years ago he was born at Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on the Pasquotank River. He had a favorite saying: “I was born on the river of Pasquotank, where the bullfrog jumps from bank to bank.
He was reared by a Christian mother whose loving hands toiled until they were horny to give him a start in the world. Helped by philanthropic friends he received his training in an academy at New Bern, at Shaw University at Raleigh, and Lincoln University, Chester County, Pa., where in both the classical and theological courses he went off with he laurels as a student and brilliant orator.
William E. Dodge, who became interested in him and made him his protégé, gave the second building that occupies the campus of Livingstone college, the present boys’ dormitory.
In the National Educational Conventions, in the world’s Methodist bodies, in prohibition campaigns and on political and lecture platforms in Europe and in America, in the brief 10 years of his larger activity, he bequeathed to the Negro race the first institution for liberal education that was founded by Negroes absolutely on the western hemisphere and in the modern world. He made his place among men who achieve because he had the happiness to select wisely a cause to spend his life for.
We ask the question in view of this outstanding lesson of a life, does the Zion Church today treasure his memory and practice his example as it should; Are we as interested in our various educational plants as Price was in giving us our first great impulse and push off in this realm? Do the leaders today love our mutual cause and are they willing to pay the price to put the program over which this new age with new demands has laid at our door?
We make no indictment, but we ask all men everywhere among us that they turn their attention toward Livingstone, Lomax-Hannon, Atkinson, and Greenville Colleges, Dinwiddie Institute, Edenton High School, Eastern North Carolina Industrial Academy, Clinton College, Lancaster Normal, Macon High School, Walters Institute and Johnson High School and ask ourselves in what measure are we ?? the spirit of Price into the education of the race and the buildings of Zion through these institutions.
They are our only man-making factories. Out of them we must get the bulk of our leadership, of our workers, of our missionaries and teachers, our ministers and laymen. They safe-guard the gates of Zion and build wisely for the construction of a great, successful, upright and useful people.
From the editorial page of The Star of Zion, Charlotte, N.C., Feb. 8, 1923
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