It is difficult to see how the trustees of at least two of the colored
colleges can escape “both horns” of the dilemma presented to them
by Dr. N. F. Mossell at a meeting Wednesday evening of the alumni
of Lincoln University. The university has been some thirty years
in existence, and counts some 400 graduates; but none of these is
represented in the faculty, and, as Dr. Mossell says, this circumstance
indicates one of two things, “either that the education of the
university is a failure, or that the caste prejudice forces the alumni
out of these positions.” Their exclusion is, at all events, anomalous.
In other educational institutions it is the common practice to appoint
graduates to faculty positions, whenever this may be done without
detriment to the interests concerned, and there is no reason why the
question should not obtain in a college for colored men as well as in
one for white men.
Such, however, is the fact, and the alumni of colored colleges
naturally feel very sore about it. As alumni, and particularly alumni
belonging to a race which, but a generation ago, it was in some
portions of this country a crime to instruct in the simplest rudiments
of education, they are supposed to take an especial pride and an
honorable interest in their colleges. They share, indeed, the interest
which of late years has been especially evinced by alumni of all the
colleges of the country.
The graduates of Howard, Biddle,[3] and Lincoln Universities have
made urgent and repeated requests for representation in the faculties
of those institutions. In the first named they have been measurably
successful, we believe, but in neither of the others has their request
met with the consideration they bespeak for it and they are convinced
that the reason is that assigned by Dr. Mossell.
And if this is possible it ought to be done. For nothing can be less in
accord with the principles on which the colored colleges were founded,
than the fostering in the faintest degree, or the most impalpable form,
of the spirit of caste, which these alumni charge upon their trustees,
and which bears upon them far more cruelly than does ignorance, since
it militates against their consideration as men.
* * * * *
“It gives me pleasure,” said Rev. J. Wheaton Smith, the noted Baptist
divine, “to say that complexion, whether light or dark, is not the test
of manhood, and should constitute no hindrance to either a pupil or
teacher. In an institution of learning for the education of the colored
race, other things being equal, I should give the preference to the
darker hue. It is demanded by a ripening future, and the past crowded
with un-numbered wrongs.”