n. 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 unrisen 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. Out of the
colleges of the North came, after