Historical voices

I think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization.

There is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that suggests power,—a naked grandeur, as it were.

All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds.

He walks too straight to be a tenant,—yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres.

This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom,—the shadow of a marvellous dream.

A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields.

Only black tenants can stand such a system, and they only because they must.

They walk up and down the streets, meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee, cheap candy, and clothes, and at dusk drive home—happy? well no, not exactly happy, but much happier than as though they had not come.

For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here the corner-stone of the Cotton…

Below Macon the world grows darker; for now we approach the Black Belt,—that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond.

The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and in mine.

Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum and slaves.

No other State in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,—a population as large as the slave population of the whole Union in 1800; no other State fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of Africans.

Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State.

Just this side Atlanta is the land of the Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the Negro problem,—the centre of those nine million men who are…

Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia?

Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?

From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.

Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.

And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.

Herein the longing of black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make…

Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again.

The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation.