The charge has recently been made that money spent on the higher
education of the Negro has been wasted. Does this charge come from
the South? When we consider that it was through Northern philanthropy
that a third of its population received their first impulse toward
better things; that these higher institutions prepared the 30,000 Negro
teachers whose services are utilized in the public schools; that the
men and women who were the beneficiaries of this philanthropy are doing
all in their power to control, guide and restrain the South’s ignorant
and vicious masses, thus lightening the public burden and lifting the
general life to a higher level: that these persons are almost without
exception earnest advocates of peace, harmony and good-will between
the races; to say nothing of the fact that these vast philanthropic
contributions have passed through the trade channels of Southern
merchants, it would seem that the charge is strangely incompatible
with that high-minded disposition and chivalrous spirit which the
South is so zealous to maintain. Does this charge come from the North?
It might not be impertinent to propound a few propositions for their
consideration. Is it possible to specify a like sum of money spent upon
any other backward race that has produced greater results than the
amount spent upon the Southern Negro? Is it the American Indian, upon
whom four centuries of missionary effort has produced no more progress
than is made by a painted ship on a painted sea? Is it the Hawaiian,
who will soon be civilized off the face of the earth? Is it the Chinese
upon whom the chief effect of Christian philanthropy is to incite them
to breathe out slaughter against the stranger within their gates? It is
incumbent upon him who claims that this money has been wasted to point
out where, in all the range of benevolent activity the contributions of
philanthropy have been more profitably spent.
It is true that forty or fifty millions of dollars have been thus
spent, but when we consider the magnitude of the task to which it was
applied, we find that it would not average one dollar a year for each
Negro child to be educated. Why should we marvel, then, that the entire
mass of ignorance and corruption has not put on enlightenment and
purity?