Education of the Negro | Page 2

equality.
This experiment has now been in operation long enough to enable us to
judge something of its results and its promises for the future. These
results are of a nature to lead us seriously to inquire whether our effort
was founded upon an adequate knowledge of the negro, of his present
development, of the requirements for his personal welfare and
evolution in the scale of civilization, and for his training in useful and
honorable citizenship. I am speaking of the majority, the mass to be
considered in any general scheme, and not of the exceptional
individuals --exceptions that will rapidly increase as the mass is
lifted--who are capable of taking advantage to the utmost of all means
of cultivation, and who must always be provided with all the
opportunities needed.
Millions of dollars have been invested in the higher education of the
negro, while this primary education has been, taking the whole mass,
wholly inadequate to his needs. This has been upon the supposition that
the higher would compel the rise of the lower with the undeveloped
negro race as it does with the more highly developed white race. An
examination of the soundness of this expectation will not lead us far
astray from our subject.
The evolution of a race, distinguishing it from the formation of a nation,
is a slow process. We recognize a race by certain peculiar traits, and by
characteristics which slowly change. They are acquired little by little in
an evolution which, historically, it is often difficult to trace. They are
due to the environment, to the discipline of life, and to what is

technically called education. These work together to make what is
called character, race character, and it is this which is transmitted from
generation to generation. Acquirements are not hereditary, like habits
and peculiarities, physical or mental. A man does not transmit to his
descendants his learning, though he may transmit the aptitude for it.
This is illustrated in factories where skilled labor is handed down and
fixed in the same families, that is, where the same kind of labor is
continued from one generation to another. The child, put to work, has
not the knowledge of the parent, but a special aptitude in his skill and
dexterity. Both body and mind have acquired certain transmissible
traits. The same thing is seen on a larger scale in a whole nation, like
the Japanese, who have been trained into what seems an art instinct.
It is this character, quality, habit, the result of a slow educational
process, which distinguishes one race from another. It is this that the
race transmits, and not the more or less accidental education of a
decade or an era. The Brahmins carry this idea into the next life, and
say that the departing spirit carries with him nothing except this
individual character, no acquirements or information or extraneous
culture. It was perhaps in the same spirit that the sad preacher in
Ecclesiastes said there is no "knowledge nor wisdom in the grave,
whither thou goest."
It is by this character that we classify civilized and even semi- civilized
races; by this slowly developed fibre, this slow accumulation of
inherent quality in the evolution of the human being from lower to
higher, that continues to exist notwithstanding the powerful influence
of governments and religions. We are understood when we speak of the
French, the Italian, the Pole, the Spanish, the English, the German, the
Arab race, the Japanese, and so on. It is what a foreign writer calls, not
inaptly, a collective race soul. As it is slow in evolution, it is persistent
in enduring.
Further, we recognize it as a stage of progress, historically necessary in
the development of man into a civilized adaptation to his situation in
this world. It is a process that cannot be much hurried, and a result that
cannot be leaped to out of barbarism by any superimposition of

knowledge or even quickly by any change of environment. We may be
right in our modern notion that education has a magical virtue that can
work any kind of transformation; but we are certainly not right in
supposing that it can do this instantly, or that it can work this effect
upon a barbarous race in the same period of time that it can upon one
more developed, one that has acquired at least a race consciousness.
Before going further, and in order to avoid misunderstanding, it is
proper to say that I have the firmest belief in the ultimate development
of all mankind into a higher plane than it occupies now. I should
otherwise be in despair. This faith will never desist in the effort to bring
about the end desired.
But, if we work with Providence, we must work in the reasonable ways