The Souls of Black Folk
they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons
of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best
traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and
worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal
content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in
educational power it was supreme, for it was the contact of living
souls.
From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone forth with the
bachelor’s degree. The number in itself is enough to put at rest the
argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher
training. If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout
the land, in both college and secondary training, be counted,
Commissioner Harris assures us “it must be increased to five times its
present average” to equal the average of the land.
Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable
numbers to master a modern college course would have been difficult to
prove. To-day it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes, many
of whom have been reported as brilliant students, have received the
bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other
leading colleges. Here we have, then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro
graduates, of whom the crucial query must be made, How far did their
training fit them for life? It is of course extremely difficult to
collect satisfactory data on such a point,—difficult to reach the men,
to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge that testimony by any
generally acceptable criterion of success. In 1900, the Conference at
Atlanta University undertook to study these graduates, and published
the results. First they sought to know what these graduates were doing,
and succeeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the living.
The direct testimony was in almost all cases corroborated by the
reports of the colleges where they graduated, so that in the main the
reports were worthy of credence. Fifty-three per cent of these
graduates were teachers,—presidents of institutions, heads of normal
schools, principals of city school-systems, and the like. Seventeen per
cent were clergymen; another seventeen per cent were in the
professions, chiefly as physicians. Over six per cent were merchants,
farmers, and artisans, and four per cent were in the government
civil-service. Granting even that a considerable proportion of the
third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of usefulness.
Personally I know many hundreds of these graduates, and have
corresponded with more than a thousand; through others I have followed
carefully the life-work of scores; I have taught some of them and some
of the pupils whom they have taught, lived in homes which they have
builded, and looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a
class with my fellow students in New England and in Europe, I cannot
hesitate in saying that nowhere have I met men and women with a broader
spirit of helpfulness, with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with
more consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter
difficulties than among Negro college-bred men. They have, to be sure,
their proportion of ne’er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools,
but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not
that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university
men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes,
and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a
certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of training.
With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have
usually been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldom been
agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have
worked steadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the South.
As teachers, they have given the South a commendable system of city
schools and large numbers of private normal-schools and academies.
Colored college-bred men have worked side by side with white college
graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone of
Tuskegee’s teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and
Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled with college graduates,
from the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacher of
agriculture, including nearly half of the executive council and a
majority of the heads of departments. In the professions, college men
are slowly but surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and
preventing the devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal
protection for the liberty and property of the toiling masses. All this
is needful work. Who would do it if Negroes did not? How could Negroes
do it if they were not trained carefully for it? If white people need
colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black
people need nothing of the sort?
If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in
the land capable by character and talent to receive that higher
training, the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half
thousand who have had something of this training in the past have in
the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, the
question then comes, What place in the future development of the South
ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That the
present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually
yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is
clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience.
If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are
to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying
a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet
subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human
intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid
peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call
for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history.
It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in
its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as
white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being recognized in the
South, and a happy renaissance of university education seems imminent.
But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to
relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the
Negro.
Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be
built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent
proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and
nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life,
and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the
riddle of the world. By taking away their best equipped teachers and
leaders, by slamming the door of opportunity in the faces of their
bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their lot?
or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands of men
taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? We ought not to
forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite the active
discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for higher
training steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in the years
from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges; from 1885
to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100 graduates.
From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods,
143, 413, and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for
training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge,
can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their
yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?
No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro’s position will more and
more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more
intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so
largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such
waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with
civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and
skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more
and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present,
until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found
energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the
Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the
moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against
them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic,
have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O
Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who
brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage,
they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic
concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their
vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may
reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black
women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two
millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally,
when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer
that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin
abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which
in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South,
and West.
I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not insist
that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the
nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of
the cradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in
the guise of terrible truth. I insist that the question of the future
is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the
past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies
may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white
neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future. That one wise
method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the
great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this
the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are
working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The foundations
of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the
college and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure.
Internal problems of social advance must inevitably come, —problems of
work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true valuing
of the things of life; and all these and other inevitable problems of
civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for himself, by
reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible solution other
than by study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of the
past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely
more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow
thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have
wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer
successfully between the _dilettante_ and the fool. We shall hardly
induce black men to believe that if their stomachs be full, it matters
little about their brains. They already dimly perceive that the paths
of peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the