The Souls of Black Folk
reason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the
more became set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and
crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom; while the marvellous
pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to take even bread
and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons of the
freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger problem of Negro education
sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable economic
quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom,
and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice,
lawlessness and ruthless competition.
The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to
full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was the proffered
answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer
of singular wisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all
the schools some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but
now was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in
direct touch with the South’s magnificent industrial development, and
given an emphasis which reminded black folk that before the Temple of
Knowledge swing the Gates of Toil.
Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the
temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader
question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in
America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material
advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is
the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and
to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever-recurring query of the
ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? And
men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of sinister signs in
recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery and
quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to
regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be
trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which
keep brown and black men in their “places,” we are coming to regard as
useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the
ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above
all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that
sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character
rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger
and delusion of black.
Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational
efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have mentioned, we find
first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the
preparation of teachers for a vast public-school system; then the
launching and expansion of that school system amid increasing
difficulties; and finally the training of workmen for the new and
growing industries. This development has been sharply ridiculed as a
logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we have been told
that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro
to work, then simple schools should have taught him to read and write,
and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have completed
the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.
That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it
needs but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairs is more
often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and
the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his
vantage-ground. Thus it was no accident that gave birth to universities
centuries before the common schools, that made fair Harvard the first
flower of our wilderness. So in the South: the mass of the freedmen at
the end of the war lacked the intelligence so necessary to modern
workingmen. They must first have the common school to teach them to
read, write, and cipher; and they must have higher schools to teach
teachers for the common schools. The white teachers who flocked South
went to establish such a common-school system. Few held the idea of
founding colleges; most of them at first would have laughed at the
idea. But they faced, as all men since them have faced, that central
paradox of the South,—the social separation of the races. At that time
it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly all relations between
black and white, in work and government and family life. Since then a
new adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs has grown
up,—an adjustment subtle and difficult to grasp, yet singularly
ingenious, which leaves still that frightful chasm at the color-line
across which men pass at their peril. Thus, then and now, there stand
in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply in the higher
realms of social intercourse, but also in church and school, on railway
and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections,
in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and
graveyards. There is still enough of contact for large economic and
group cooperation, but the separation is so thorough and deep that it
absolutely precludes for the present between the races anything like
that sympathetic and effective group-training and leadership of the one
by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward peoples must
have for effectual progress.
This the missionaries of ’68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and
trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a
common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools
could be founded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern
whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers
could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and
the most effective help that could be given him was the establishment
of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was slowly but
surely reached by every student of the situation until simultaneously,
in widely separated regions, without consultation or systematic plan,
there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for
the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of
this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single
generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they
wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the
land, and they made Tuskegee possible.
Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader
development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then some
became high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one
year or more of studies of college grade. This development was reached
with different degrees of speed in different institutions: Hampton is
still a high school, while Fisk University started her college in 1871,
and Spelman Seminary about 1896. In all cases the aim was identical,—to
maintain the standards of the lower training by giving teachers and
leaders the best practicable training; and above all, to furnish the
black world with adequate standards of human culture and lofty ideals
of life. It was not enough that the teachers of teachers should be
trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far as
possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter
civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters,
but of life itself.
It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South began with
higher institutions of training, which threw off as their foliage
common schools, and later industrial schools, and at the same time
strove to shoot their roots ever deeper toward college and university
training. That this was an inevitable and necessary development, sooner
or later, goes without saying; but there has been, and still is, a
question in many minds if the natural growth was not forced, and if the
higher training was not either overdone or done with cheap and unsound
methods. Among white Southerners this feeling is widespread and
positive. A prominent Southern journal voiced this in a recent
editorial.
“The experiment that has been made to give the colored students
classical training has not been satisfactory. Even though many were
able to pursue the course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way,
learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and
import of their instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or
valuable occupation for their future. The whole scheme has proved a
waste of time, efforts, and the money of the state.”
While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme and
overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient
number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the
undertaking? Are not too many students prematurely forced into this
work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro with
his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real life? Such
natural questions cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a Nation
naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable answer
without careful inquiry and patient openness to conviction. We must not
forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a
priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is to listen to
evidence.
The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to
deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too
many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some
cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality
has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education
throughout the land; it is the almost inevitable incident of
educational growth, and leaves the deeper question of the legitimate
demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched. And this latter
question can be settled in but one way,—by a first-hand study of the
facts. If we leave out of view all institutions which have not actually
graduated students from a course higher than that of a New England high
school, even though they be called colleges; if then we take the
thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up many
misapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are
they? what do they teach? and what sort of men do they graduate?
And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta,
Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, is
peculiar, almost unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before
me as I write, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England granite,
covering a grave, which graduates of Atlanta University have placed
there,—
“IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER AND FRIEND AND OF THE
UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED, AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT THEY,
THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN MIGHT BE BLESSED.”
This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a
friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money these
seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts
beating with red blood;—a gift which to-day only their own kindred and
race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to
their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing
in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid
greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in these institutions came not
to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the
defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. The colleges