While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme and overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the undertaking?
W.E.B. Du Bois
The Public Record
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. He completed graduate work at Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He was a professor at Atlanta University and over the course of his life wrote many books and articles. He spent the last years of his life in Ghana and died in Accra on August 27, 1963.
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The whole scheme has proved a waste of time, efforts, and the money of the state.
Even though many were able to pursue the course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way, learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and import of their instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or valuable…
The experiment that has been made to give the colored students classical training has not been satisfactory.
This conclusion was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers…
Thus it was no accident that gave birth to universities centuries before the common schools, that made fair Harvard the first flower of our wilderness.
That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it needs but a little thought to prove.
And men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of sinister signs in recent educational movements.
Johnson blandly assured us that education was needful solely for the embellishments of life, and was useless for ordinary vermin.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful.
This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men for life.
Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside, And naked on the Air of Heaven ride, Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him In this clay carcase crippled to abide?