W.E.B. Du Bois

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

In the professions, college men are slowly but surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing the devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for the liberty and property of the toiling masses.

With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have usually been conservative, careful leaders.

Personally I know many hundreds of these graduates, and have corresponded with more than a thousand; through others I have followed carefully the life-work of scores; I have taught some of them and some of the pupils whom they have taught…

The number in itself is enough to put at rest the argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher training.

In actual formal content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme, for it was the contact of living souls.

The colleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England.

The teachers in these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them.

This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a friend; not cash, but character.

And this latter question can be settled in but one way,—by a first-hand study of the facts.

We must not forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is to listen to evidence.

Such natural questions cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a Nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patient openness to conviction.