The Souls of Black Folk
confronting her. The need of the South is knowledge and culture,—not in
dainty limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad busy abundance
in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the Apples of
Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from the curse
of the Boeotian lovers.
The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of the South. They
alone can bear the maiden past the temptation of golden fruit. They
will not guide her flying feet away from the cotton and gold; for—ah,
thoughtful Hippomenes!—do not the apples lie in the very Way of Life?
But they will guide her over and beyond them, and leave her kneeling in
the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, virgin and
undefiled. Sadly did the Old South err in human education, despising
the education of the masses, and niggardly in the support of colleges.
Her ancient university foundations dwindled and withered under the foul
breath of slavery; and even since the war they have fought a failing
fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest and commercial
selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism, and starving for lack
of broadly cultured men. And if this is the white South’s need and
danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen’s sons!
how pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the
conservation of soul from sordid aims and petty passions! Let us build
the Southern university—William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas,
Tulane, Vanderbilt, and the others—fit to live; let us build, too, the
Negro universities:—Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad; Howard, at
the heart of the Nation; Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship
has been held above the temptation of numbers. Why not here, and
perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centres of learning
and living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the South
a few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic
tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to other hands, and
giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?
Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and
kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and
tolerance,—all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children of
the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not
upside down.
Teach workers to work,—a wise saying; wise when applied to German boys
and American girls; wiser when said of Negro boys, for they have less
knowledge of working and none to teach them. Teach thinkers to think,—a
needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose
lot is gravest must have the carefulest training to think aright. If
these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for
one or seven or sixty million souls! shall we teach them trades, or
train them in liberal arts? Neither and both: teach the workers to work
and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and
philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools. Nor can we pause here.
We are training not isolated men but a living group of men,—nay, a
group within a group. And the final product of our training must be
neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we
must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid
money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the glory
of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth,
not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing;
by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness
and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth; by founding the common
school on the university, and the industrial school on the common
school; and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a
birth, not an abortion.
When night falls on the City of a Hundred Hills, a wind gathers itself
from the seas and comes murmuring westward. And at its bidding, the
smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the mighty city and
covers it like a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle
above Stone Hall. And they say that yon gray mist is the tunic of
Atalanta pausing over her golden apples. Fly, my maiden, fly, for
yonder comes Hippomenes!
VI.
Of the Training of Black Men
Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?
OMAR KHAYYÁM (FITZGERALD).
From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago the
slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, have flowed down to
our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the larger world
here and overseas, saying, the multiplying of human wants in
culture-lands calls for the world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying
them. Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer,
and all men, black, yellow, and white. The larger humanity strives to
feel in this contact of living Nations and sleeping hordes a thrill of
new life in the world, crying, “If the contact of Life and Sleep be
Death, shame on such Life.” To be sure, behind this thought lurks the
afterthought of force and dominion,—the making of brown men to delve
when the temptation of beads and red calico cloys.
The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving river
is the thought of the older South,—the sincere and passionate belief
that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a _tertium quid_,
and called it a Negro,—a clownish, simple creature, at times even
lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk
within the Veil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the
afterthought,—some of them with favoring chance might become men, but
in sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we build about them
walls so high, and hang between them and the light a veil so thick,
that they shall not even think of breaking through.
And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought,—the
thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter
of men who are black and whitened, crying “Liberty, Freedom,
Opportunity—vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living
men!” To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—suppose,
after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this
mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?
So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest
and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a
shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet
sure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and
afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men
for life.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and
_dilettante_, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once
grotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks
through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart
laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of
the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we risk poverty
and loss. If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we
debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their
blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us from
national decadence? Only that saner selfishness, which Education
teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a
heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be
reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always
successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature.
And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone. They must be
recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way
of civilization and religion and common decency. They can be met in but
one way,—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity
of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration
of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not
lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is
to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a
harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The
guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the
path of honor and humanity.
And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and partially
contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Education leaps to
the lips of all:—such human training as will best use the labor of all
men without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us
poise to encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and to stamp
out those that in sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned
souls within the Veil, and the mounting fury of shackled men.
But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle
straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches
living; but what training for the profitable living together of black
men and white? A hundred and fifty years ago our task would have seemed
easier. Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured us that education was needful
solely for the embellishments of life, and was useless for ordinary
vermin. To-day we have climbed to heights where we would open at least
the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures to many,
and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not wholly
by birth or the accidents of the stock market, but at least in part
according to deftness and aim, talent and character. This programme,
however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that part of the
land where the blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we are dealing
with two backward peoples. To make here in human education that ever
necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent—of the ideal
and the practical in workable equilibrium—has been there, as it ever
must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment and
frequent mistakes.
In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of work in
Southern education since the Civil War. From the close of the war until
1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief. There
were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen’s
Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking system and co-operation. Then
followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the building
of complete school systems in the South. Normal schools and colleges
were founded for the freedmen, and teachers trained there to man the
public schools. There was the inevitable tendency of war to
underestimate the prejudices of the master and the ignorance of the
slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage of the storm.
Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from 1885
to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South. The land saw
glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The
educational system striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a
field of work ever broader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly
founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of
varying efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools were doing
little more than common-school work, and the common schools were
training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and
training these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, by