Historical voices

They already dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated by…

We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains.

Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and the fool.

Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow thinking than from over-education and over-refinement?

The foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure.

That one wise method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth.

I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation…

I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the cradle to whom these…

And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this…

And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of…

When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution.

If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us?

You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen!

Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours.

And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge…

Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization.

The dangerously clear logic of the Negro’s position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp…

Here, then, is the plain thirst for training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?

By taking away their best equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming the door of opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from…

Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world.

Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat.

But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.

It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph.

That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.