A strong plea for the higher education of the Negro, which those who are
interested in the future of the freedmen cannot afford to ignore. Prof.
DuBois produces ample evidence to prove conclusively the truth of his
statement that "to attempt to establish any sort of a system of common
and industrial school training, without _first_ providing for the higher
training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the
winds."
[Illustration: W.E. BURGHARDT DuBOIS.]
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional
men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal
with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this
race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of
the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a
difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational
experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the
object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily
men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess
artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make
manhood the object of the work of the schools--intelligence, broad
sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of
men to it--this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must
underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill
of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man
mistake the means of living for the object of life.
* * * * *
If this be true--and who can deny it--three tasks lay before me; first to
show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among
American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly, to show how
these men may be educated and developed; and thirdly, to show their
relation to the Negro problem.
* * * * *
You misjudge us because you do not know us. From the very first it has
been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and
elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded
their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but
the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of
natural internal leadership? Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the
first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for
natural selection and the survival of the fittest. In colonial days came
Phillis Wheatley and Paul Cuffe striving against the bars of prejudice;
and Benjamin Banneker, the almanac maker, voiced their longings when he
said to Thomas Jefferson, "I freely and cheerfully acknowledge that I am
of the African race, and in colour which is natural to them, of the
deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the
Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that I now confess to you that I am not
under that state of tyrannical thraldom and inhuman captivity to which too
many of my brethren are doomed, but that I have abundantly tasted of the
fruition of those blessings which proceed from that free and unequalled
liberty with which you are favored, and which I hope you will willingly
allow, you have mercifully received from the immediate hand of that Being
from whom proceedeth every good and perfect gift.
"Suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the arms of the
British crown were exerted with every powerful effort, in order to reduce
you to a state of servitude; look back, I entreat you, on the variety of
dangers to which you were exposed; reflect on that period in which every
human aid appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore
the aspect of inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a
serious and grateful sense of your miraculous and providential
preservation, you cannot but acknowledge, that the present freedom and
tranquility which you enjoy, you have mercifully received, and that a
peculiar blessing of heaven.
"This, sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a state
of Slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horrors of its
condition. It was then that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that
you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy
to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages: 'We hold these
truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'"
Then came Dr. James Derham, who could tell even the learned Dr. Rush
something of medicine, and Lemuel Haynes, to whom Middlebury College gave
an honorary A.M. in 1804. These and others we may call the Revolutionary
group of distinguished Negroes--they were persons of marked ability,
leaders of a Talented Tenth, standing conspicuously among the best of
their time. They strove by word and deed to save the color line from
becoming the line between the bond and free, but all they could do was
nullified by Eli Whitney and the Curse of Gold. So they passed into
forgetfulness.
But their spirit did not wholly die; here and there in the early part of
the century came other exceptional men. Some were natural sons of
unnatural fathers and were given often a liberal training and thus a race
of educated mulattoes sprang up to plead for black men's rights. There was
Ira Aldridge, whom all Europe loved to honor; there was that Voice crying
in the Wilderness, David Walker, and saying:
"I declare it does appear to me as though some nations think God is
asleep, or that he made the Africans for nothing else but to dig their
mines and work their farms, or they cannot believe history, sacred or
profane. I ask every man who has a heart, and is blessed with the
privilege of believing--Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures?
Do you say he is? Then if he gives peace and tranquility to tyrants and
permits them to keep our fathers, our mothers, ourselves and our children
in eternal ignorance and wretchedness to support them and their families,
would he be to us a God of Justice? I ask, O, ye Christians, who hold us
and our children in the most abject ignorance and degradation that ever a
people were afflicted with since the world began--I say if God gives you
peace and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and
our children, who have never given you the least provocation--would He be
to us a God of Justice? If you will allow that we are men, who feel for
each other, does not the blood of our fathers and of us, their children,
cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth against you for the cruelties and murders
with which you have and do continue to afflict us?"
This was the wild voice that first aroused Southern legislators in 1829 to
the terrors of abolitionism.
In 1831 there met that first Negro convention in Philadelphia, at which
the world gaped curiously but which bravely attacked the problems of race
and slavery, crying out against persecution and declaring that "Laws as
cruel in themselves as they were unconstitutional and unjust, have in many
places been enacted against our poor, unfriended and unoffending brethren
(without a shadow of provocation on our part), at whose bare recital the
very savage draws himself up for fear of contagion--looks noble and
prides himself because he bears not the name of Christian." Side by side
this free Negro movement, and the movement for abolition, strove until
they merged into one strong stream. Too little notice has been taken of
the work which the Talented Tenth among Negroes took in the great
abolition crusade. From the very day that a Philadelphia colored man
became the first subscriber to Garrison's "Liberator," to the day when
Negro soldiers made the Emancipation Proclamation possible, black leaders
worked shoulder to shoulder with white men in a movement, the success of
which would have been impossible without them. There was Purvis and
Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and Alexander
Crummel, and above all, Frederick Douglass--what would the abolition
movement have been without them? They stood as living examples of the
possibilities of the Negro race, their own hard experiences and well
wrought culture said silently more than all the drawn periods of
orators--they were the men who made American slavery impossible. As Maria
Weston Chapman once said, from the school of anti-slavery agitation "a
throng of authors, editors, lawyers, orators and accomplished gentlemen of
color have taken their degree! It has equally implanted hopes and
aspirations, noble thoughts, and sublime purposes, in the hearts of both
races. It has prepared the white man for the freedom of the black man, and
it has made the black man scorn the thought of enslavement, as does a
white man, as far as its influence has extended. Strengthen that noble
influence! Before its organization, the country only saw here and there in
slavery some faithful Cudjoe or Dinah, whose strong natures blossomed even
in bondage, like a fine plant beneath a heavy stone. Now, under the
elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society,
the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the
noblest temples."
Where were these black abolitionists trained? Some, like Frederick
Douglass, were self-trained, but yet trained liberally; others, like
Alexander Crummell and McCune Smith, graduated from famous foreign
universities. Most of them rose up through the colored schools of New York
and Philadelphia and Boston, taught by college-bred men like Russworm, of
Dartmouth, and college-bred white men like Neau and Benezet.
After emancipation came a new group of educated and gifted leaders:
Langston, Bruce and Elliot, Greener, Williams and Payne. Through political
organization, historical and polemic writing and moral regeneration, these
men strove to uplift their people. It is the fashion of to-day to sneer at
them and to say that with freedom Negro leadership should have begun at
the plow and not in the Senate--a foolish and mischievous lie; two hundred
and fifty years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling
was in vain till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred
and fifty years more the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow,
but unless he have political rights and righteously guarded civic
status, he will still remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything
of rascals, that he now is. This all sane men know even if they dare
not say it.
And so we come to the present--a day of cowardice and vacillation, of
strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced
dallying with Truth and Right. Who are to-day guiding the work of the
Negro people? The "exceptions" of course. And yet so sure as this Talented
Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in
alarm: "These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime--these
are the happy rule." Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation
made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched
Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous,
crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and
made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was
able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk. A
saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires,
continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional
it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the
capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever
stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood,
well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no
breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and
usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure
of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is
it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such
aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back
into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers
have raised themselves?
Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly
raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and
character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the
bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top
downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that
are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of
human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that
progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few
already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the
risen down.
How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands
of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and
most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and
universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to just what the
university of the Negro should teach or how it should teach it--I
willingly admit that each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar
curriculum. But this is true: A university is a human invention for the
transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation,
through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no
other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.
All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or
nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of
training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and
necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their
bellies, and no God greater than Gold. This is true training, and thus in
the beginning were the favored sons of the freedmen trained. Out of the
colleges of the North came, after the blood of war, Ware, Cravath, Chase,
Andrews, Bumstead and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and
civilization in the black South. Where ought they to have begun to build?
At the bottom, of course, quibbles the mole with his eyes in the earth.
Aye! truly at the bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge,
down in the very depths of knowledge there where the roots of justice
strike into the lowest soil of Truth. And so they did begin; they founded
colleges, and up from the colleges shot normal schools, and out from the
normal schools went teachers, and around the normal teachers clustered
other teachers to teach the public schools; the college trained in Greek
and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000
others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the
alphabet to nine millions of men, who to-day hold $300,000,000 of
property. It was a miracle--the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th
century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us
that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper way to found a system of
education is first to gather the children and buy them spelling books and
hoes; afterward men may look about for teachers, if haply they may find
them; or again they would teach men Work, but as for Life--why, what has
Work to do with Life, they ask vacantly.
Was the work of these college founders successful; did it stand the test
of time? Did the college graduates, with all their fine theories of life,
really live? Are they useful men helping to civilize and elevate their
less fortunate fellows? Let us see. Omitting all institutions which have
not actually graduated students from a college course, there are to-day in
the United States thirty-four institutions giving something above high
school training to Negroes and designed especially for this race.
Three of these were established in border States before the War; thirteen
were planted by the Freedmen's Bureau in the years 1864-1869; nine were
established between 1870 and 1880 by various church bodies; five were
established after 1881 by Negro churches, and four are state institutions
supported by United States' agricultural funds. In most cases the college
departments are small adjuncts to high and common school work. As a matter
of fact six institutions--Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Shaw, Wilberforce and
Leland, are the important Negro colleges so far as actual work and number
of students are concerned. In all these institutions, seven hundred and
fifty Negro college students are enrolled. In grade the best of these
colleges are about a year behind the smaller New England colleges and a
typical curriculum is that of Atlanta University. Here students from the
grammar grades, after a three years' high school course, take a college
course of 136 weeks. One-fourth of this time is given to Latin and Greek;
one-fifth, to English and modern languages; one-sixth, to history and
social science; one-seventh, to natural science; one-eighth to
mathematics, and one-eighth to philosophy and pedagogy.
In addition to these students in the South, Negroes have attended Northern
colleges for many years. As early as 1826 one was graduated from Bowdoin
College, and from that time till to-day nearly every year has seen
elsewhere, other such graduates. They have, of course, met much color
prejudice. Fifty years ago very few colleges would admit them at all. Even
to-day no Negro has ever been admitted to Princeton, and at some other
leading institutions they are rather endured than encouraged. Oberlin was
the great pioneer in the work of blotting out the color line in colleges,
and has more Negro graduates by far than any other Northern college.
The total number of Negro college graduates up to 1899, (several of the
graduates of that year not being reported), was as follows:
---------------+---------------+-----------------
|Negro Colleges.| White Colleges.
---------------+---------------+-----------------
Before '76 | 137 | 75
'75-80 | 143 | 22
'80-85 | 250 | 31
'85-90 | 413 | 43
'90-95 | 465 | 66
'96-99 | 475 | 88
Class Unknown | 57 | 64
---------------+---------------+-----------------
Total | 1,914 | 390
---------------+---------------+-----------------
Of these graduates 2,079 were men and 252 were women; 50 per cent. of
Northern-born college men come South to work among the masses of their
people, at a sacrifice which few people realize; nearly 90 per cent. of
the Southern-born graduates instead of seeking that personal freedom and
broader intellectual atmosphere which their training has led them, in some
degree, to conceive, stay and labor and wait in the midst of their black
neighbors and relatives.
The most interesting question, and in many respects the crucial question,
to be asked concerning college-bred Negroes, is: Do they earn a living? It
has been intimated more than once that the higher training of Negroes has
resulted in sending into the world of work, men who could find nothing to
do suitable to their talents. Now and then there comes a rumor of a
colored college man working at menial service, etc. Fortunately, returns
as to occupations of college-bred Negroes, gathered by the Atlanta
conference, are quite full--nearly sixty per cent. of the total number of
graduates.
This enables us to reach fairly certain conclusions as to the occupations
of all college-bred Negroes. Of 1,312 persons reported, there were:
---------------------------------+----------+------------
| Per Cent.|
---------------------------------+----------+------------
Teachers, | 53.4 |************
Clergymen, | 16.8 |******
Physicians, etc., | 6.3 |****
Students, | 5.6 |***
Lawyers, | 4.7 |***
In Govt. Service, | 4.0 |**
In Business, | 3.6 |**
Farmers and Artisans, | 2.7 |*
Editors, Secretaries and Clerks, | 2.4 |*
Miscellaneous. | .5 |*
---------------------------------+----------+------------
Over half are teachers, a sixth are preachers, another sixth are students
and professional men; over 6 per cent. are farmers, artisans and
merchants, and 4 per cent. are in government service. In detail the
occupations are as follows:
_Occupations of College-Bred Men._
Teachers:
Presidents and Deans, 19
Teacher of Music, 7
Professors, Principals and Teachers, 675 Total 701
Clergymen:
Bishop, 1
Chaplains U.S. Army, 2
Missionaries, 9
Presiding Elders, 12
Preachers, 197 Total 221
Physicians,
Doctors of Medicine, 76
Druggists, 4
Dentists, 3 Total 83