is not only a teacher but an author who writes with
authority upon his chosen themes, whether he is always known as a Negro
writer or not. He is endowed with an accurate, analytical mind, and the
most engaging blackness, for which some of us thank God, because there can
be no argument as to the source of his mental powers.

Now of the other, William E.B. DuBois, what shall be said? Educator and
author, political economist and poet, an Eastern man against a Southern
back-ground, he looms up strong, vivid and in bold relief. I say looms
advisedly, because, intellectually, there is something so distinctively
big about the man. Since the death of the aged Dr. Crummell, we have had
no such ripe and finished scholar. Dr. DuBois, Harvard gave him to us, and
there he received his Ph.D., impresses one as having reduced all life and
all literature to a perfect system. There is about him a fascinating calm
of certain power, whether as a searcher after economic facts, under the
wing of the University of Pennsylvania, or defying the "powers that be" in
a Negro college or leading his pupils along the way of light, one always
feels in him this same sense of conscious, restrained, but assured force.

Some years ago in the course of his researches, he took occasion to tell
his own people some plain hard truths, and oh, what a howl of protest and
denunciation went up from their assembled throats, but it never once
disturbed his magnificent calm. He believed what he had said, and not for
a single moment did he think of abandoning his position.

He goes at truth as a hard-riding old English squire would take a
difficult fence. Let the ditch be beyond if it will.

Dr. DuBois would be the first to disclaim the name of poet but everything
outside of his statistical work convicts him. The rhythm of his style, his
fancy, his imagery, all bid him bide with those whose souls go singing by
a golden way. He has written a number of notable pamphlets and books, the
latest of which is "The Soul of the Black Folk," an invaluable
contribution to the discussion of the race problem by a man who knows
whereof he speaks.

Dr. DuBois is at Atlanta University and has had every opportunity to
observe all the phases of America's great question, and I wish I might
write at length of his books.

It may be urged that too much time has already been taken up with the
educational side of the Negro, but the reasonableness of this must become
apparent when one rem