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This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not
alms, but a friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is
not money these seething millions want, but love and sympathy,
the pulse of hearts beating with red blood;--a gift which
to-day only their own kindred and race can bring to the
masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored
children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in
American history, and one of the few things untainted by
sordid greed and cheap vainglory. 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. 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. They lived and ate together,
studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning
light. 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.
From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone
forth with the bachelor's degree. The number in itself is
enough to put at rest the argument that too large a proportion
of Negroes are receiving higher training. If the ratio to population
of all Negro students throughout the land, in both college and
secondary training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assures
us "it must be increased to five times its present average" to
equal the average of the land.
Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable
numbers to master a modern college course would have
been difficult to prove. To-day it is proved by the fact that
four hundred Negroes, many of whom have been reported as
brilliant students, have received the bachelor's degree from
Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other leading colleges.
Here we have, then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro graduates,
of whom the crucial query must be made, How far did
their training fit them for life? It is of course extremely
difficult to collect satisfactory data on such a point,--difficult
to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge
that testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of success.
In 1900, the Conference at Atlanta University undertook
to study these graduates, and published the results. First they
sought to know what these graduates were doing, and succeeded
in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the living.
The direct testimony was in almost all cases corroborated
by the reports of the colleges where they graduated, so that in
the main the reports were worthy of credence. Fifty-three per
cent of these graduates were teachers,--presidents of institutions,
heads of normal schools, principals of city school-systems,
and the like. Seventeen per cent were clergymen;
another seventeen per cent were in the professions, chiefly as
physicians. Over six per cent were merchants, farmers, and
artisans, and four per cent were in the government civil-service.
Granting even that a considerable proportion of the
third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of usefulness.
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, lived in homes which they have builded, and
looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a class
with my fellow students in New England and in Europe, I
cannot hesitate in saying that nowhere have I met men and
women with a broader spirit of helpfulness, with deeper
devotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated determination
to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than among
Negro college-bred men. They have, to be sure, their proportion
of ne'er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools, but
they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have
not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate
with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage
from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed
from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness
and gaucherie, despite the best of training.
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