Historical voices

Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white?

The guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the path of honor and humanity.

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps.

And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with.

They can be met in but one way,—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.

They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature.

Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly.

Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact.

Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.

If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence?

Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we…

So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand…

Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white.

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.

And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold.

And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.

We are training not isolated men but a living group of men,—nay, a group within a group.

Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools.

Teach thinkers to think,—a needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose lot is gravest must have the carefulest training to think aright.

Teach workers to work,—a wise saying; wise when applied to German boys and American girls; wiser when said of Negro boys, for they have less knowledge of working and none to teach them.

Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and tolerance,—all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university.

And if this is the white South’s need and danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen’s sons! how pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the conservation of soul from sordid aims and petty passions!

Her ancient university foundations dwindled and withered under the foul breath of slavery; and even since the war they have fought a failing fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest and commercial selfishness, stunted by the…

Sadly did the Old South err in human education, despising the education of the masses, and niggardly in the support of colleges.