selves useful to their race and generation, the
question then comes, What place in the future development of the South
ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That the
present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually
yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is
clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience.
If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are
to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying
a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet
subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human
intimacy,--if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress
amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will
call for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern
history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and
black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will
triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being
recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of university
education seems imminent. But the very voices that cry hail to this
good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the
higher education of the Negro.

Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be
built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent
proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers
and nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of
Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to
read the riddle of the world. By taking away their best equipped
teachers and leaders, by slamming the door of opportunity in the faces
of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with
their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands
of men taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? We ought
not to forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite the
active discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for
higher training steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in
the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges;
from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100
graduates. From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three
periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates. Here