EDUCATION AND THE RACE.
[With most of the present sources of power controlled by the white race
it behooves my race as well as the other subject races to learn the
wisdom of the weak and to develop to the fullest that organ whereby
weakness has been able to overcome strength; namely, the intellect. It
is not with our teeth that we will tear the white man out of our
ancestral land. It isn’t with our jaws that we can ring from his hard
hands consideration and respect. It must be done by the upper and not by
the lower parts of our heads. Therefore, I have insisted ever since my
entry into the arena of racial discussion that we Negroes must take to
reading, study and the development of intelligence as we have never done
before. In this respect we must pattern ourselves after the Japanese who
have gone to school to Europe but have never used Europe’s education to
make them the apes of Europe’s culture. They have absorbed, adopted,
transformed and utilized, and we Negroes must do the same. The three
editorials in this chapter and the article which follows them were
written to indicate from time to time the duty of the transplanted
African in this respect.]
_Reading for Knowledge_
Some time ago we wrote an editorial entitled “Read, Read, Read!” We
touch upon the same subject again, because in our recent trip to
Washington we found thousands of people who are eager to get in touch
with the stored-up knowledge which the books contain, but do not know
just where to turn for it. In New York the same situation obtains, and
no help is afforded by the papers of our race.
The reason is that some of our newspaper editors don’t read and don’t
know beans themselves. James W. Johnson is one of the notable
exceptions. We were cheered up a good deal by noting his recent
editorial advice to our “leaders” to read Arthur Henderson’s “The Aims
of Labor.” But that was six months after the editor of _The Voice_ had
been telling thousands of the “led” all about it and about the British
Labor Party and the Russian Bolsheviki in his outdoor talks in Harlem.
But there is no doubt that the New Negro is producing a New Leadership
and that this new leadership will be based not upon the ignorance of the
masses, but upon their intelligence. The old leadership was possible
partly because the masses were ignorant. Today the masses include
educated laymen who have studied science, theology, history and
economics, not, perhaps in college but, nevertheless, deeply and down to
date. These young men and women are not going to follow fools and,
indeed, are not going to follow any one, blindly. They want a reason for
the things that they are asked to do and to respect. The others, the
so-called Common People, are beginning to read and understand. As we sat
in the great John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church in Washington one Sunday
night, and heard the cultured black minister speak to his people on
literature, science, history and sociology, and yet so simply that even
the dullest could catch the meat and inspiration of his great ideas, we
could not help saying as we went out of the church: “Depend upon it,
these people will demand as much from their next minister.” In fact our
race will demand as much from all its leaders. And they will demand no
less for themselves.
So, with a glad heart, we reprint the following paragraphs from our
earlier editorial trusting that our readers everywhere may find them
helpful:
As a people our bent for books is not encouraging. We mostly read trash.
And this is true not only of our rank and file but even of our leaders.
When we heard Kelly Miller address the Sunrise Club of New York at a
Broadway hotel two or three years ago, we were shocked at the ignorance
of modern science and modern thought which his remarks displayed. His
biology was of the brand of Pliny who lived about eighteen hundred years
ago. For him Darwin and Spencer and Jacques Loeb had never existed nor
written. His ignorance of the A.B.C.’s of astronomy and geology was
pitiful. If this is true of the leaders to whom our reading masses look,
what can we expect from those reading masses? The masses must be taught
to love good books. But to love them they must first know them. The
handicaps placed on us in America are too great to allow us to ignore
the help which we can get from that education which we get out of school
for ourselves—the only one that is really worth while.
Without the New Knowledge the New Negro is no better than the old. And
this new knowledge will be found in the books. Therefore, it would be
well if every Negro of the new model were to make up his (or her) mind
to get the essentials of modern science and modern thought as they are
set down in the books which may be easily had. Don’t talk about Darwin
and Spencer: read them!
To help the good work along we append the following list of books that
are essential. When you _master_ these you will have a better
“education” than is found in nine-tenths of the graduates of the average
American college.
“Modern Science and Modern Thought,” by Samuel Laing; “The Origin of
Species” and “The Descent of Man,” by Charles Darwin; “The Principles of
Sociology” and “First Principles,” by Herbert Spencer; “The Childhood of
the World” and “The Childhood of Religion,” by Edward Clodd;
“Anthropology,” by E. B. Tylor (very easy to read and a work of standard
information on Races, Culture and the origins of Religion, Art and
Science); Buckle’s “History of Civilization”; Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire”; “The Martyrdom of Man,” by Winwood Reade; the
books on Africa by Livingstone and Mungo Park, and “The Mind of
Primitive Man,” by Franz Boas. —Sept., 1918.
_Education and the Race_
In the dark days of Russia, when the iron heel of Czarist despotism was
heaviest on the necks of the people, those who wished to rule decreed
that the people should remain ignorant. Loyalty to interests that were
opposed to theirs was the prevailing public sentiment of the masses. In
vain did the pioneers of freedom for the masses perish under the knout
and the rigors of Siberia. They sacrificed to move the masses, but the
masses, strong in their love of liberty, lacked the head to guide the
moving feet to any successful issue. It was then that Leo Tolstoi and
the other intelligentsia began to carry knowledge to the masses. Not
only in the province of Tula, but in every large city, young men of
university experience would assemble in secret classes of instruction,
teaching them to read, to write, to know, to think and to love
knowledge. Most of this work was underground at first. But it took.
Thousands of educated persons gave themselves to this work-without pay:
their only hope of reward lay in the future effectiveness of an
instructed mass movement.
What were the results? As knowledge spread, enthusiasm was backed by
brains. The Russian revolution began to be sure of itself. The
workingmen of the cities studied the thing that they were “up against,”
gauged their own weakness and strength as well as their opponents’. The
despotism of the Czar could not provoke them to a mass movement before
they were ready and had the means; and when at last they moved, they
swept not only the Czar’s regime but the whole exploiting system upon
which it stood into utter oblivion.
What does this mean to the Negro of the Western world? It may mean much,
or little: that depends on him. If other men’s experiences have value
for the New Negro Manhood Movement it will seek now to profit by them
and to bottom the new fervor of faith in itself with the solid support
of knowledge. The chains snap from the limbs of the young giant as he
rises, stretches himself, and sits up to take notice. But let him, for
his future’s sake, insist on taking notice. To drop the figure of
speech, we Negroes who have shown our _manhood_ must back it by our
_mind_. This world, at present, is a white man’s world—even in Africa.
We, being what we are, want to shake loose the chains of his control
from our corner of it. We must either accept his domination and our
inferiority, or we must contend against it. But we go up to win; and
whether we carry on that contest with ballots, bullets or business, we
can not win from the white man unless we know at least as much as the
white man knows. For, after all, knowledge _is_ power.
But that isn’t all. What kind of knowledge is it that enables white men
to rule black men’s lands? Is it the knowledge of Hebrew and Greek,
philosophy or literature? It isn’t. It is the knowledge of explosives
and deadly compounds: that is chemistry. It is the knowledge which can
build ships, bridges, railroads and factories: that is engineering. It
is the knowledge which harnesses the visible and invisible forces of the
earth and air and water: that is science, modern science. And that is
what the New Negro must enlist upon his side. Let us, like the Japanese,
become a race of knowledge-getters, preserving our racial soul, but
digesting into it all that we can glean or grasp, so that when Israel
goes up out of bondage he will be “skilled in all the learning of the
Egyptians” and competent to control his destiny.
Those who have knowledge must come down from their Sinais and give it to
the common people. Theirs is the great duty to simplify and make clear,
to light the lamps of knowledge that the eyes of their race may see;
that the feet of their people may not stumble. This is the task of the
Talented Tenth.
To the masses of our people we say: Read! Get the reading habit; spend
your spare time not so much in training the feet to dance, as in
training the head to think. And, at the very outset, draw the line
between books of opinion and books of information. Saturate your minds
with the latter and you will be forming your own opinions, which will be
worth ten times more to you than the opinions of the greatest minds on
earth. Go to school whenever you can. If you can’t go in the day, go at
night. But remember always that the best college is that on your
bookshelf: the best education is that on the inside of your own head.
For in this work-a-day world people ask first, not “Where were you
educated?” but “What do you know?” and next, “What can you do with it?”
And if we of the Negro race can master modern knowledge—the kind that
counts—we will be able to win for ourselves the priceless gifts of
freedom and power, and we will be able to hold them against the world.
_The Racial Roots of Culture_
Education is the name which we give to that process by which the ripened
generation brings to bear upon the rising generation the stored-up
knowledge and experience of the past and present generations to fit it
for the business of life. If we are not to waste money and energy, our
educational systems should shape our youth for what we intend them to
become.
We Negroes, in a world in which we are the under dog, must shape our
youth for living in such a world. Shall we shape them mentally to accept
the status of under-dog as their predestined lot? Or shall we shape them
into men and women fit for a free world? To do the former needs nothing
more than continuing as we are. To do the latter is to shape their souls
for continued conflict with a theory and practice in which most of the
white world that surrounds them are at one.
The educational system in the United States and the West Indies was
shaped by white people for white youth, and from their point of view, it
fits their purpose well. Into this system came the children of Negro
parents when chattel slavery was ended—and their relation to the
problems of life was obviously different. The white boy and girl draw
exclusively from the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and
present generations of white people to fit them for the business of
being dominant whites in a world full of colored folk. The examples of
valor and virtue on which their minds are fed are exclusively white
examples. What wonder, then, that each generation comes to maturity with
the idea imbedded in its mind that only white men are valorous and fit
to rule and only white women are virtuous and entitled to chivalry,
respect and protection? What wonder that they think, almost
instinctively, that the Negro’s proper place, nationally and
internationally, is that of an inferior? It is only what we should
naturally expect.
But what seems to escape attention is the fact that the Negro boy and
girl, getting the same (though worse) instruction, also get from it the
same notion of the Negro’s place and part in life which the white
children get. Is it any wonder, then, that they so readily accept the
status of inferiors; that they tend to disparage themselves, and think
themselves worth while only to the extent to which they look and act and
think like the whites? They know nothing of the stored-up knowledge and
experience of the past and present generations of Negroes in their
ancestral lands, and conclude there is no such store of knowledge and
experience. They readily accept the assumption that Negroes have never
been anything but slaves and that they never had a glorious past as
other fallen peoples like the Greeks and Persians have. And this despite
the mass of collected testimony in the works of Barth, Schweinfurth,
Mary Kingsley, Lady Lugard, Morel, Ludolphus, Blyden, Ellis, Ratzel,
Kidd, Es-Saadi, Casely Hayford and a host of others, Negro and white.
A large part of the blame for this deplorable condition must be put upon
the Negro colleges like Howard, Fisk, Livingstone and Lincoln in the
United States, and Codrington, Harrison and the Mico in the West Indies.
These are the institutions in which our cultural ideals and educational
systems are fashioned for the shaping of the minds of the future
generations of Negroes. It cannot be expected that it shall begin with
the common schools; for, in spite of logic, educational ideas and ideals
spread from above downwards. If we are ever to enter into the
confraternity of colored peoples it should seem the duty of our Negro
colleges to drop their silly smatterings of “little Latin and less
Greek” and establish modern courses in Hausa and Arabic, for these are
the living languages of millions of our brethern in modern Africa.
Courses in Negro history and the culture of West African peoples, at
least, should be given in every college that claims to be an institution
of learning for Negroes. Surely an institution of learning for Negroes
should not fail to be also an institution of Negro learning. —The New
Negro, Sept. 1919.
_The New Knowledge for the New Negro_
Quite a good deal of unnecessary dispute has been going on these days
among the guardians of the inner temple as to just which form of worship
is necessary at the shrine of the Goddess Knowledge. In plain English,
the pundits seem to be at odds in regard to the kind of education which
the Negro should have. Of course, it has long been known that the
educational experts of white America were at odds with ours on the same
subject; now, however, ours seem to be at odds among themselves.
The essence of the present conflict is not the easy distinction between
“lower” and “higher” education, which really has no meaning in terms of
educational principles, but it is rather “the knowledge of things”
versus “the knowledge of words.” The same conflict has been waged in
England from the days of Huxley’s youth to the later nineties when the
London Board Schools were recognized and set the present standard of
efficiency for the rest of England. The present form of the question is,
“Shall education consist of Latin and Greek, literature and metaphysics,
r of modern science, modern languages and modern thought?” The real
essence of the question is whether we shall train our children to
grapple effectively with the problem of life that lies before them, or
to look longingly back upon the past standards of life and thought and
consider themselves a special class because of this.
If education be, as we assert, a training for life, it must of course
have its roots in the past. But so has the art of the blacksmith, the
tailor, the carpenter, the bookbinder or the priest. What the
classicists really seek is the domination of the form, method and aim of
that training by the form, methods and aims of an earlier age.
_Classics, Clerics and Class Culture_
Perhaps an explanation of that earlier training may serve to give the
real innerness of the classicists’ position so that ordinary people may
understand it better than the classicists themselves seem to do. In the
Middle Ages, the schools of Western Europe and the subject matter of the
education given in them were based upon the Latin “disciplines.” Western
Europe had no literature, no learning, no science of its own. It was the
church—particularly the monasteries—to which men had to go to get such
training as was obtainable in a barbarous age. This training was, of
course, given in the tongue of the church which was Latin, the clerical
language. The contact of medieval Europeans with the dark-skinned Arabs
added Greek and the knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy to the
earlier medieval discipline. Imbedded in this was the substance of
science nurtured by the Arabs and added to by them.
The ruling classes kept their children within the treadmill of these two
literatures and languages and it came to be thought that this was the
indispensable training for a gentleman. But:—
_“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”_
We are in a different age, an age in which the nation, not the church,
gives training to all children, and not merely to the children of
aristocrats who will grow up to do nothing. The children of the people
must become the doers of all that is done in the world of tomorrow, and
they must be trained for this doing. Today in England, not Oxford, the
home of lost ideals, but such institutions as the University of London,
are the sources of that training which gives England its physicians,
surgeons, inventors, business men and artists.
_Classicists Ignorant of Latin and Greek_
But the noise of the classicists may be rudely stopped by merely
pointing out the hollowness of their watch words. These persons would
have us believe that Latin and Greek are, in their eyes, the backbone of
any education that is worth while. Very well then, let us take them at
their word. I make the broad assertion that not one in one thousand of
them can read a page of Greek or Latin that may be set before them. I
offer to put under their noses a page of Athenaeus or Horace (to say
nothing of more important classical authors) and if they should be able
to read and translate it at sight I shall be genuinely surprised. Let
the common reader who is a man of today make the test with this little
bit of Latin verse:
_“Exegi momentum acre perennius_
_Regalique situ pyramidum altius.”_
Let him ask some classicist to translate off-hand this common school
boy’s tag from a most popular author and note whether they can place the
author or translate the lines. Here is another:
_Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,_
_Tendimus in Latium._
To speak in plain United States, when it comes to the showdown it will
be found that those of us who argue in favor of the modern discipline
(in so far as we have any knowledge of classical literature) know more
about them than those whose sole defence they are.
It is said by the classicists that a knowledge of Latin and Greek is
necessary to an adequate comprehension of the English language. But so
is the knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, French and Italian. And when it
comes to facility and clearness of expression, it will be found that
Huxley’s prose is superior to that of Matthew Arnold, and Brisbane’s
superior to that of any professor of the Latin language in Harvard or
Yale. So much for the ghost fighters. Requiescant in pace!
_The Knowledge We Need_
Now, what is the knowledge which the New Negro needs most? He needs
above all else a knowledge of the wider world and of the long past. But
that is history, modern and ancient: History as written by Herodotus and
John Bach McMaster; sociology not as conceived by Giddings, but as
presented by Spencer and Ward, and anthropology as worked out by Boas
and Thomas. The Negro needs also the knowledge of the best thought; but
that is literature as conceived, not as a collection of flowers from the
tree of life, but as its garnered fruit. And, finally, the Negro needs a
knowledge of his own kind, concerning which we shall have something to
say later, And the purposes of this knowledge? They are, to know our
place in the human processus, to strengthen our minds by contact with
the best and most useful thought-products evolved during the long rise
of man from anthropoid to scientist; to inspire our souls and to lift
our race industrially, commercially, intellectually to the level of the
best that there is in the world about us. For _never until the Negro’s
knowledge of nitrates and engineering, of chemistry and agriculture, of
history, science and business is on a level, at least, with that of the
whites, will the Negro be able to measure arms successfully with them._