[Illustration]
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
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
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
guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between
the black lowly and the black men emancipated by training and culture.
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the
standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of
the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact
and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.
Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must
persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of
culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign
human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks
a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate
and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new. Such souls
aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly
bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing of
black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their
experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange
rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of
view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all human
hearts. And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the
chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer
spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move
arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women
glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between
the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon
Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all
graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell
above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is
this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of
Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between
Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
VII.
Of the Black Belt
I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother’s children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept.