The Negro Problem | Page 8

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