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The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved
by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes
must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem
of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass
away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own
and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate
task. Its technique is a matter for educational experts, but its
object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of
man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily
men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may
possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only
as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools —
intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and
is, and of the relation of men to it — this is the curriculum
of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this
foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness
of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means
of living for the object of life….
Who are today guiding the work of the Negro people? The "exceptions"
of course. And yet so sure as this Talented Tenth is pointed out,
the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in alarm: "These
are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime — these
are the happy rule." Of course they are the rule, because a
silly nation made them the rule: Because for three long centuries
this people lynched Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women
who dared to be virtuous, crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be
ambitious, and encouraged and made to flourish servility and lewdness
and apathy. But nor even this was able to crush all manhood and
chastity and aspiration from black folk. A saving remnant continually
survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself
in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional it is to be sure,
but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the capability of Negro
blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever stop to reflect
that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood, well-educated,
owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath
was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness,
and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of
the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent,
is it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle
such aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these
people back into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they
and their fathers have raised themselves?
Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly
raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent
and character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized
from the bottom upward? Never, it is, ever was and ever will be
from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises
and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.
This is the history of human progress; and the two historic mistakes
which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no
more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that
it would better the uprisen to pull the risen down.
How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and
the hands of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer:
The best and most capable of their youth must be schooled in the
colleges and universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to
just what the university of the Negro should teach or how it should
teach it — I willingly admit that each soul and each race-soul
needs its own peculiar curriculum. But this is true: A university
is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture
from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds
and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will
suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.
All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated
group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented
few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled
by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no
aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold. This
is true training, and thus in the beginning were the favored sons
of the freedmen trained. The main question, so far as the Southern
Negro is concerned, is: What under the present circumstance, must
a system of education do in order to raise the Negro as quickly
as possible in the scale of civilization? The answer to this question
seems to me clear: It must strengthen the Negro's character, increase
his knowledge and teach him to earn a living. Now it goes without
saying that it is hard to do all these things simultaneously or
suddenly and that at the same time it will not do to give all the
attention to one and neglect the others; we could give black boys
trades, but that alone will not civilize a race of ex-slaves; we
might simply increase their knowledge of the world, but this would
not necessarily make them wish to use this knowledge honestly; we
might seek to strengthen character and purpose, but to what end
if this people have nothing to eat or to wear? A system of education
is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor
is it a mere matter of schools.
Education is that whole system of human training within and without
the school house walls, which molds and develops men. If then we
start out to train an ignorant and unskilled people with a heritage
of bad habits, our system of training must set before itself two
great aims — the one dealing with knowledge and character,
the other part seeking to give the child the technical knowledge
necessary for him to earn a living under the present circumstances.
These objects are accomplished in part by the opening of the common
schools on the one, and of the industrial schools on the other.
But only in part, for there must also be trained those who are to
teach these schools — men and women of knowledge and culture
and technical skill who understand modern civilization, and have
the training and aptitude to impart it to the children under them.
There must be teachers, and teachers of teachers, and to attempt
to establish any sort of a system of common and industrial school
training, without first (and I say first advisedly) without first
providing for the higher training of the very best teachers, is
simply throwing your money to the winds. School houses do not teach
themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send
out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened
by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life
into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black
or white, Greek, Russian or American. Nothing, in these latter days,
has so dampened the faith of thinking Negroes in recent educational
movements, as the fact that such movements have been accompanied
by ridicule and denouncement and decrying of those very institutions
of higher training which made the Negro public school possible,
and make Negro industrial schools thinkable. It was: Fisk, Atlanta,
Howard and Straight, those colleges born of the faith and sacrifice
of the abolitionists, that placed in the black schools of the South
the 30,000 teachers and more, which some, who depreciate the work
of these higher schools, are using to teach their own new experiments.
If Hampton, Tuskegee and the hundred other industrial schools prove
in the future to be as successful as they deserve to be, then their
success in training black artisans for the South, will be due primarily
to the white colleges of the North and the black colleges of the
South, which trained the teachers who today conduct these institutions.
There was a time when the American people believed pretty devoutly
that a log of wood with a boy at one end and Mark Hopkins at the
other represented the highest ideal of human training. But in these
eager days it would seem that we have changed all that and think
it necessary to add a couple of saw-mills and a hammer to this outfit,
and, at a pinch, to dispense with the services of Mark Hopkins.
I would not deny, or for a moment seem to deny, the paramount necessity
of teaching the Negro to work, and to work steadily and skillfully;
or seem to depreciate in the slightest degree the important part
industrial schools must play in the accomplishment of these ends,
but I do say, and insist upon it, that it is industrialism drunk
with its vision of success, to imagine that its own work can be
accomplished without providing for the training of broadly cultured
men and women to teach its own teachers, and to teach the teachers
of the public schools. But I have already said that human education
is not simply a matter of schools; it is much more a matter of family
and group life - the training of one's home, of one's daily companions,
of one's social class. Now the black boy of the South moves in a
black world - a world with its own leaders, its own thoughts, its
own ideals. In this world he gets by far the larger part of his
life training, and through the eyes of this dark world he peers
into the veiled world beyond. Who guides and determines the education
which he receives in his world? His teachers here are the group-leaders
of the Negro people — the physicians and clergymen, the trained
fathers and mothers, the influential and forceful men about him
of all kinds; here it is, if at all, that the culture of the surrounding
world trickles through and is handed on by the graduates of the
higher schools. Can such culture training of group leaders be neglected?
Can we afford to ignore it? Do you think that if the leaders of
thought among Negroes are not trained and educated thinkers, that
they will have no leaders? On the contrary a hundred half-trained
demagogues will still hold the places they so largely occupy now,
and hundreds of vociferous busy-bodies will multiply. You have no
choice; either you must help furnish this race from within its own
ranks with thoughtful men of trained leadership, or you must suffer
the evil consequences of a headless misguided rabble.
I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for
black boys, and for white boys, too. I believe that next to the
founding of Negro colleges the most valuable addition to Negro education
since the war, has been industrial training for black boys. Nevertheless,
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men
carpenters, it is to make carpenters men; there are two means of
making the carpenter a man, each equally important: the first is
to give the group and community in which he works, liberally trained
teachers and leaders to teach him and his family what life means;
the second is to give him sufficient intelligence and technical
skill to make him an efficient workman; the first object demands
the Negro college and college-bred men — not a quantity of
such colleges, but a few of excellent quality; not too many college-bred
men, but enough to leaven the lump, to inspire the masses, to raise
the Talented Tenth to leadership; the second object demands a good
system of common schools, well-taught, conveniently located and
properly equipped. . . .
Twenty years ago the rank and file of white public school teachers
were not as good as the Negro teachers. But they, by scholarships
and good salaries, have been encouraged to thorough normal and collegiate
preparation, while the Negro teachers have been discouraged by starvation
wages and the idea that any training will do for a black teacher.
If carpenters are needed it is well and good to train men as carpenters.
But to train men as carpenters, and then set them to teaching is
wasteful and criminal; and to train men as teachers and then refuse
them living wages, unless they become carpenters, is rank nonsense.
The United States Commissioner of Education says in his report for
1900: . . . "While the number in colored high schools and colleges
had increased somewhat faster than the population, it had not kept
pace with the average of the whole country, for it had fallen from
30 per cent. to 24 per cent. of the average quota. Of all colored
pupils, one (1) in one hundred was engaged in secondary and higher
work, and that ratio has continued substantially for the past twenty
years. If the ratio of colored population in secondary and higher
education is to be equal to the average for the whole country, it
must be increased to five times its present average." And if
this be true of the secondary and higher education, it is safe to
say that the Negro has not one-tenth his quota in college studies.
How baseless, therefore, is the charge of too much training! We
need Negro teachers for the Negro common schools, and we need first-class
normal schools and colleges to train them. This is the work of higher
Negro education and it must be done.
Further than this, after being provided with group leaders of civilization,
and a foundation of intelligence in the public schools, the carpenter,
in order to be a man, needs technical skill. This calls for trade
schools. Now trade schools are not nearly such simple things as
people once thought. The original idea was that the "Industrial"
school was to furnish education, practically free, to those willing
to work for it; it was to "do" things — i.e.: become
a center of productive industry, it was to be partially, if not
wholly, self-supporting, and it was to teach trades. Admirable as
were some of the ideas underlying this scheme, the whole thing simply
would not work in practice; it was found that if you were to use
time and material to teach trades thoroughly, you could not at the
same time keep the industries on a commercial basis and make them
pay. Many schools started out to do this on a large scale and went
into virtual bankruptcy. Moreover, it was found also that it was
possible to teach a boy a trade mechanically, without giving him
the full educative benefit of the process, and, vice versa, that
there was a distinctive educative value in teaching a boy to use
his hands and eyes in carrying out certain physical processes, even
though he did not actually learn a trade. It has happened, therefore,
in the last decade, that a noticeable change has come over the industrial
schools. In the first place the idea of commercially remunerative
industry in a school is being pushed rapidly to the background.
There are still schools with shops and farms that bring an income,
and schools that use student labor partially for the erection of
their buildings and the furnishing of equipment. It is coming to
be seen, however, in the education of the Negro, as clearly as it
has been seen in the education of the youths the world over, that
it is the boy and not the material product, that is the true object
of education.
Consequently the object of the industrial school came to be the
thorough training of boys regardless of the cost of the training,
so long as it was thoroughly well done. Even at this point, however,
the difficulties were not surmounted. In the first place modern
industry has taken great strides since the war, and the teaching
of trades is no longer a simple matter. Machinery and long processes
of work have greatly changed the work of the carpenter, the ironworker
and the shoemaker. A really efficient workman must be to-day an
intelligent man who has had good technical training in addition
to thorough common school, and perhaps even higher training. To
meet this situation the industrial schools began a further development;
they established distinct Trade Schools for the thorough training
of better class artisans, and at the same time they sought to preserve
for the purposes of general education, such of the simpler processes
of elementary trade learning as were best suited therefore. In this
differentiation of the Trade School and manual training, the best
of the industrial schools simply followed the plain trend of the
present educational epoch. A prominent educator tells us that, in
Sweden, "In the beginning the economic conception was generally
adopted, and everywhere manual training was looked upon as a means
of preparing the children of the common people to earn their living.
But gradually it came to be recognized that manual training has
a more elevated purpose, and one, indeed, more useful in the deeper
meaning of the term. It came to be considered as an educative process
for the complete moral, physical and intellectual development of
the child."
Thus, again, in the manning of trade schools and manual training
schools we are thrown back upon the higher training as its source
and chief support. There was a time when any aged and worn out carpenter
could teach in a trade school. But not so today. Indeed the demand
for college-bred men by a school like Tuskegee, ought to make Mr.
Booker T. Washington the firmest friend of higher training. Here
he has as helpers the son of a Negro senator, trained in Greek and
the humanities, and graduated at Harvard; the son of a Negro congressman
and lawyer, trained in Latin and mathematics, and graduated at Oberlin;
he has as his wife, a woman who read Virgil and Homer in the same
class room with me; he has as college chaplain, a classical graduate
of Atlanta University; as teacher of science, a graduate of Fisk;
as teacher of history, a graduate of Smith, — indeed some
thirty of his chief teachers are college graduates, and instead
of studying French grammars in the midst of weeds, or buying pianos
for dirty cabins, they are at Mr. Washington's right hand helping
him in a noble work. And yet one of the effects of Mr. Washington's
propaganda has been to throw doubt upon the expediency of such training
for Negroes, as these persons have had.
Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race
transplanted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether
you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain.
If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and
work are the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it
unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence.
Education must not simply teach work — it must teach Life.
The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought
and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do
this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race,
like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.
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