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 tile
name of Christian." Side by side this free Negro movement, and the
movement for abolition, strove until they merged in to 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 tile 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 nor 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 uprisen 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 tile 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
schoolwork. 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 tile 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:
Before '76: Negro Colleges=137, White Colleges=75
'75-80: Negro Colleges=143, White Colleges=22
'80-85: Negro Colleges=250, White Colleges=31
'85-90: Negro Colleges=413, White Colleges=43
'90-95: Negro Colleges=465, White Colleges=66
'95-99: Negro Colleges=475, White Colleges=88
Class Unknown: Negro Colleges=57, White Colleges=64
Total: Negro Colleges=1914, White Colleges=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:
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.
701 Teachers:
Presidents and Deans, 19
Teacher of Music, 7
Professors, Principals and Teachers, 675
221 Clergymen:
Bishop, 1
Chaplains U. S. Army, 2
Missionaries, 9
Presiding Elders, 12
Preachers, 197
83 Physicians:
Doctors of Medicine, 76
Druggists, 4
Dentists, 3
74 Students
62 Lawyers
53 in Civil Service:
U. S. Minister Plenipotentiary, 1
U. S. Consul, 1
U. S. Deputy Collector, 1
U. S. Gauger, 1
U. S. Postmasters, 2
U. S. Clerks, 44
State Civil Service, 2
City Civil Service, 1
47 Business Men:
Merchants, etc., 30
Managers, 13
Real Estate Dealers, 4
26 Farmers
22 Clerks and Secretaries:
Secretary of National Societies, 7
Clerks, etc., 15
9 Artisans
9 Editors
5 Miscellaneous
These figures illustrate vividly the function of the college-bred
Negro. He is, as he ought to be, the group leader, the man who sets the
ideals of the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads
its social movements. It need hardly be argued that the Negro people
need social leadership more than most groups; that they have no
traditions to fall back upon, no long established customs, no strong
family ties, no well defined social classes. All these things must be
slowly and painfully evolved. The preacher was, even before the war, the
group leader of the Negroes, and the church their greatest social
institution. Naturally this preacher was ignorant and often immoral, and
the problem of replacing the older type by better educated men has been
a difficult one. Both by direct work and by direct influence on other
preachers, and on congregations, the college-bred preacher has an
opportunity for reformatory work and moral inspiration, the value of
which cannot be overestimated.
It has, however, been in the furnishing of teachers that the
Negro college has found its peculiar function. Few persons realize how
vast a work, how mighty a revolution has been thus accomplished. To
furnish five millions and more of ignorant people with teachers of their
own race and blood, in one generation, was not only a very difficult
undertaking, but very important one, in that, it placed before the eyes
of almost every Negro child an attainable ideal. It brought the masses
of the blacks in contact with modern civilization, made black men the
leaders of their communities and trainers of the new generation. In this
work college-bred Negroes were first teachers, and then teachers of
teachers. And here it is that the broad culture of college work has been
of peculiar value. Knowledge of life and its wider meaning, has been the
point of the Negro's deepest ignorance, and the sending out of teachers
whose training has not been simply for bread winning, but also for human
culture, has been of inestimable value in the training of these men.
In earlier years the two occupations of preacher and teacher were
practically the only ones open to the black college graduate. Of later
years a larger diversity of life among his people, has opened new
avenues of employment. Nor have these college men been paupers and
spendthrifts; 557 college-bred Negroes owned in 1899, $1,342,862.50
worth of real estate (assessed value), or $2,411 per family. The real
value of the total accumulations of the whole group is perhaps about
$10,000,000, or $5,000 a piece. Pitiful is it not beside the fortunes of
oil kings and steel trusts, but after all is the fortune of the
millionaire the only stamp of true and successful living? Alas! it is,
with many and there's the rub.
The problem of training the Negro is to-day immensely complicated
by the fact that the whole question of the efficiency and
appropriateness of our present systems of education, for any kind of
child, is a matter of active debate, in which final settlement seems
still afar off. Consequently it often happens that persons arguing for
or against certain systems of education for Negroes, have these
controversies in mind and miss the real question at issue. The main
question, so far as the Southern Negro is concerned, is: What under the
present circumstance, must a system of education do in order to raise
the Negro as quickly as possible in the scale of civilization? The
answer to this question seems to me clear: It must strengthen the
Negro's character, increase his knowledge and teach him to earn a
living. Now it goes without saying that it is hard to do all these
things simultaneously or suddenly and that at the same time it will not
do to give all the attention to one and neglect the others; we could
give black boys trades, but that alone will not civilize a race of
ex-slaves; we might simply increase their knowledge of the world, but
this would not necessarily make them wish to use this knowledge
honestly; we might seek to strengthen character and purpose, but to what
end if this people have nothing to eat or to wear? A system ofeducation
is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a
mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training
within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
If then we start out to train an ignorant and unskilled people with a
heritage of bad habits, our system of training must set before itself
two great aims - the one dealing with knowledge and character, the other
part seeking to give the child the technical knowledge necessary for him
to earn a living under the present circumstances. These objects are
accomplished in part by the opening of the common schools on the one,
and of the industrial schools on the other. But only in part, for there
must also be trained those who are to teach these schools - men and
women of knowledge and culture and technical skill who understand modern
civilization, and have the training and aptitude to impart it to the
children under them. There must be teachers, and teachers of teachers,
and to attempt to establish any sort of a system of common and
industrial school training, without first (and I say first advisedly)
without first providing for the higher training of the very best
teachers, is simply throwing your money to the winds. School houses do
not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not
send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and
strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of
life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or
white, Greek, Russian or American. Nothing, in these latter days, has so
dampened the faith of thinking Negroes in recent educational movements,
as the fact that such movements have been accompanied by ridicule and
denouncement and decrying of those very institutions of higher training
which made the Negro public school possible, and make Negro industrial
schools thinkable. It was: Fisk, Atlanta, Howard and Straight, those
colleges born of the faith and sacrifice of the abolitionists, that
placed in the black schools of the South the 30,000 teachers and more,
which some, who depreciate the work of these higher schools, are using
to teach their own new experiments. If Hampton, Tuskegee and the hundred
other industrial schools prove in the future to be as successful as they
deserve to be, then their success in training black artisans for the
South, will be due primarily to the white colleges of the North and the
black colleges of the South, which trained the teachers who to-day
conduct these institutions. There was a time when the American people
believed pretty devoutly that a log of wood with a boyat one end and
Mark Hopkins at the other, represented the highest ideal of human
training. But in these eager days it would seem that we have changed all
that and think it necessary to add a couple of saw-mills and a hammer to
this outfit, and, at a pinch, to dispense with the services of Mark
Hopkins.
I would not deny, or for a moment seem to deny, the paramount
necessity of teaching the Negro to work, and to work steadily and
skillfully; or seem to depreciate in the slightest degree the important
part industrial schools must play in the accomplishment of these ends,
but I do say, and insist upon it, that it is industrialism drunk with
its vision of success, to imagine that its own work can be accomplished
without providing for the training of broadly cultured men and women to
teach its own teachers, and to teach the teachers of the public schools.
But I have already said that human education is not simply a
matter of schools; it is much more a matter of family and group life -
the training of one's home, of one's daily companions, of one's social
class. Now the black boy of the South moves in a black world - a world
with its own leaders, its own thoughts, its own ideals. In this world he
gets by far the larger part of his life training, and through the eyes
of this dark world he peers into the veiled world beyond. Who guides and
determines the education which he receives in his world? His teachers
here are the group-leaders of the Negro people - the physicians and
clergymen, the trained fathers and mothers, the influential and forceful
men about him of all kinds; here it is, if at all, that the culture of
the surrounding world trickles through and is handed on by the graduates
of the higher schools. Can such culture training of group leaders be
neglected? Can we afford to ignore it? Do you think that if the leaders
of thought among Negroes are not trained and educated thinkers, that
they will have no leaders? On the contrary a hundred half-trained
demagogues will still hold the places they so largely occupy now, and
hundreds of vociferous busy-bodies will multiply. You have no choice;
either you must help furnish this race from within its own ranks with
thoughtful men of trained leadership, or you must suffer the evil
consequences of a headless misguided rabble.
I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching
for black boys, and for white boys, too. I believe that next to the
founding of Negro colleges the most valuable addition to Negro education
since the war, has been industrial training for black boys.
Nevertheless, I insist that the object of all true education is not to
make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men; there are two means
of making the carpenter a man, each equally important: the first is to
give the group and community in which he works, liberally trained
teachers and leaders to teach him and his family what life means; the
second is to give him sufficient intelligence and technical skill to
make him an efficient workman; the first object demands the Negro
college and college-bred men - not a quantity of such colleges, but a
few of excellent quality; not too many college-bred men, but enough to
leaven the lump, to inspire the masses, to raise the Talented Tenth to
leadership; the second object demands a good system of common schools,
well-taught, conveniently located and properly equipped.
The Sixth Atlanta Conference truly said in 1901:
"We call the attention of the Nation to the fact that less than
one million of the three million Negro children of school age, are at
present regularly attending school, and these attend a session which
lasts only a few months.
"We are to-day deliberately rearing millions of our citizens in
ignorance, and at the same time limiting the rights of citizenship by
educational qualifications. This is unjust. Half the black youth of the
land have no opportunities open to them for learning to read, write and
cipher. In the discussion as to the proper training of Negro children
after they leave the public schools, we have forgotten that they are not
yet decently provided with public schools.
"Propositions are beginning to be made in the South to reduce the
already meagre school facilities of Negroes. We congratulate the South
on resisting, as much as it has, this pressure, and on the many millions
it has spent on Negro education. But it is only fair to point out that
Negro taxes and the Negroes' share of the income from indirect taxes and
endowments have fully repaid this expenditure, so that the Negro public
school system has not in all probability cost the white taxpayers a
single cent since the war.
"This is not fair. Negro schools should be a public burden, since
they are a public benefit. The Negro has a right to demand good common
school training at the hands of the States and the Nation since by their
fault he is not in position to pay for this himself."
What is the chief need for the building up of the Negro public
school in the South? The Negro race in the South needs teachers to-day
above all else. This is the concurrent testimony of all who know the
situation. For the supply of this great demand two things are needed -
institutions of higher education and money for school houses and
salaries. It is usually assumed that a hundred or more institutions for
Negro training are to-day turning out so many teachers and college-bred
men that the race is threatened with an over-supply. This is sheer
nonsense. There are to-day less than 3,000 living Negro college
graduates in the United States, and less than 1,000 Negroes in college.
Moreover, in the 164 schools for Negroes, 95 per cent. of their students
are doing elementary and secondary work, work which should be done in
the public schools. Over half the remaining 2,157 students are taking
high school studies. The mass of so-called "normal" schools for the
Negro, are simply doing elementary common school work, or, at most, high
school work, with a little instruction in methods. The Negro colleges
and the post-graduate courses at other institutions are the only
agencies for the broader and more careful training of teachers. The work
of these institutions is hampered for lack of funds. It is getting
increasingly difficult to get funds for training teachers in the best
modern methods, and yet all over the South, from State Superintendents,
county officials, city boards and school principals comes the wail, "We
need TEACHERS!" and teachers must be trained. As the fairest minded of
all white Southerners, Atticus G. Haygood, once said: "The defects of
colored teachers are so great as to create an urgent necessity for
training better ones. Their excellencies and their successes are
sufficient to justify the best hopes of success in the effort, and to
vindicate the judgment of those who make large investments of money and
service, to give to colored students opportunity for thoroughly
preparing themselves for the work of teaching children of their people."
The truth of this has been strikingly shown in the marked
improvement of white teachers in the South. Twenty years ago the rank
and file of white public school teachers were not as good as the Negro
teachers. But they, by scholarships and good salaries, have been
encouraged to thorough normal and collegiate preparation, while the
Negro teachers have been discouraged by starvation wages and the idea
that any training will do for a black teacher. If carpenters are needed
it is well and good to train men as carpenters. But to train men as
carpenters, and then set them to teaching is wasteful and criminal; and
to train men as teachers and then refuse them living wages, unless they
become carpenters, is rank nonsense.
The United States Commissioner of Education says in his report
for 1900: "For comparison between the white and colored enrollment in
secondary and higher education, I have added together the enrollment in
high schools and secondary schools, with the attendance on colleges and
universities, not being sure of the actual grade of work done in the
colleges and universities. The work done in the secondary schools is
reported in such detail in this office, that there can be no doubt of
its grade."
He then makes the following comparisons of persons in every
million enrolled in secondary and higher education:
1880: Whole Country=4362, Negroes=1289
1900: Whole Country=4362, Negroes=2061
And he concludes: "While the number in colored high schools and colleges
had increased somewhat faster than the population, it had not kept pace
with the average of the whole country, for it had fallen from 30 per
cent. to 24 per cent. of the average quota. Of all colored pupils, one
(1) in one hundred was engaged in secondary and higher work, and that
ratio has continued substantially for the past twenty years. If the
ratio of colored population in secondary and higher education is to be
equal to the average for the whole country, it must be increased to five
times its present average." And if this be true of the secondary and
higher education, it is safe to say that the Negro has not one-tenth his
quota in college studies. How baseless, therefore, is the charge of too
much training! We need Negro teachers for the Negro common schools, and
we need first-class normal schools and colleges to train them. This is
the work of higher Negro education and it must be done.
Further than this, after being provided with group leaders of
civilization, and a foundation of intelligence in the public schools,
the carpenter, in order to be a man, needs technical skill. This calls
for trade schools. Now trade schools are not nearly such simple things
as people once thought. The original idea was that the "Industrial"
school was to furnish education, practically free, to those willing to
work for it; it was to "do" things - i.e.: become a center of productive
industry, it was to be partially, if not wholly, self-supporting, and it
was to teach trades. Admirable as were some of the ideas underlying this
scheme, the whole thing simply would not work in practice; it was found
that if you were to use time and material to teach trades thoroughly,
you could not at the same time keep the industries on a commercial basis
and make them pay. Many schools started out to do this on a large scale
and went into virtual bankruptcy. Moreover, it was found also that it
was possible to teach a boy a trade mechanically, without giving him the
full educative benefit of the process, and, vice versa, that there was a
distinctive educative value in teaching a boy to use his hands and eyes
in carrying out certain physical processes, even though he did not
actually learn a trade. It has happened, therefore, in the last decade,
that a noticeable change has come over the industrial schools. In the
first place the idea of commercially remunerative industry in a school
is being pushed rapidly to the background. There are still schools with
shops and farms that bring an income, and schools that use student labor
partially for the erection of their buildings and the furnishing of
equipment. It is coming to be seen, however, in the education of the
Negro, as clearly as it has been seen in the education of the youths the
world over, that it is the boy and not the material product, that is the
true object of education. Consequently the object of the industrial
school came to be the thorough training of boys regardless of the cost
of the training, so long as it was thoroughly well done.
Even at this point, however, the difficulties were not
surmounted. In the first place modern industry has taken great strides
since the war, and the teaching of trades is no longer a simple matter.
Machinery and long processes of work have greatly changed the work of
the carpenter, the ironworker and the shoemaker. A really efficient
workman must be to-day an intelligent man who has had good technical
training in addition to thorough common school, and perhaps even higher
training. To meet this situation the industrial schools began a further
development; they established distinct Trade Schools for the thorough
training of better class artisans, and at the same time they sought to
preserve for the purposes of general education, such of the simpler
processes of elementary trade learning as were best suited therefor. In
this differentiation of the Trade School and manual training, the best
of the industrial schools simply followed the plain trend of the present
educational epoch. A prominent educator tells us that, in Sweden, "In
the beginning the economic conception was generally adopted, and
everywhere manual training was looked upon as a means of preparing the
children of the common people to earn their living. But gradually it
came to be recognized that manual training has a more elevated purpose,
and one, indeed, more useful in the deeper meaning of the term. It came
to be considered as an educative process for the complete moral,
physical and intellectual development of the child."
Thus, again, in the manning of trade schools and manual training
schools we are thrown back upon the higher training as its source and
chief support. There was a time when any aged and wornout carpenter
could teach in a trade school. But not so to-day. Indeed the demand for
college-bred men by a school like Tuskegee, ought to make Mr. Booker T.
Washington the firmest friend of higher training. Here he has as helpers
the son of a Negro senator, trained in Greek and the humanities, and
graduated at Harvard; the son of a Negro congressman and lawyer, trained
in Latin and mathematics, and graduated at Oberlin; he has as his wife,
a woman who read Virgil and Homer in the same class room with me; he has
as college chaplain, a classical graduate of Atlanta University; as
teacher of science, a graduate of Fisk; as teacher of history, a
graduate of Smith, - indeed some thirty of his chief teachers are
college graduates, and instead of studying French grammars in the midst
of weeds, or buying pianos for dirty cabins, they are at Mr.
Washington's right hand helping him in a noble work. And yet one of the
effects of Mr. Washington's propaganda has been to throw doubt upon the
expediency of such training for Negroes, as these persons have had.
Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race
transplanted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether
you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If
you do not lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and work are
the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired
by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not
simply teach work - it must teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro
race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among
their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train
men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved
by its exceptional men.
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