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Self Made Man (Woman)




By self-made men, I mean precisely what the phrase imparts to the popular mind. They are the men who, without the ordinary help and favoring circumstances which usually distinguish and promote success, have risen, in one way or another, and attained knowledge, power, position, and fame in the world. They are the men who owe very little to birth, relationships, or friendly surroundings. They have neither had the advantage of wealth inherited, nor early training, nor approved means of education. Like the overtaxed Hebrew slaves of Egypt, they have been required to make bricks without straw. They are the men who have come up, not only without the voluntary aid and assitance of society, but often in open, direct and derisive defiance of all the powers and efforts of society to obstruct, repress, and keep them down. In a world of schools, colleges, and other institutions of learning, they have been compelled to obtain education out of earth, air, and sky. In a peculiar sense, they are indebted to themselves for themselves, and are architects of their own fortunes. If they have traveled far, they have made the road on which they traveled. If they have acsended high, they have built their own ladder. They are the men who come from fathomless social depths and have burst the social strata that bound them. From the cornfield, the plow, and the workbench, from the heartless pavements of large and crowded cities, barefoot, hungry, and friendless, out of the depths, obscurity, darkness, and destitution, they have come. Flung overboard in the midnight storm, on a perilous ocean, without oars, ropes, or life-preservers, they have bravely buffeted the frowning billows with their own sinewy arms, and have risen in safety, where other men, supplied with the best appliances, have fainted, despaired and gone down. Such men as these, whether we find them in one postion or another, whether in the college or in the factory, whether professors or plowmen, whether of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-African origin, are self-made men, and have fairly won that title, and what honor soever that title implies.
----Frederick Douglass



Though a man of this class may not be worshipped as a hero, there is a genuine heroism in the struggle he has made, and sublimity and glory in the triumph. Every such example of success is a help to the race. It is an assertion of the latent powers of simple unaided manhood, and affords encouragement to the least favore among men. It robs labor of pain. It dispels gloom fromthe brow of destitution and makes the roughest and flintiest hardships in the stern battle of seem trifles light as air.
----El Hajji Malik Shabazz



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