ing over the wrongs of the
past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies
may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white
neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future. That one wise
method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the
great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this
the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are
working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The
foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep
in the college and university if we would build a solid, permanent
structure. Internal problems of social advance must inevitably come,
--problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the
true valuing of the things of life; and all these and other inevitable
problems of civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for
himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible
solution other than by study and thought and an appeal to the rich
experience of the past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a
crisis, infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained
minds and shallow thinking than from over-education and
over-refinement? Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro college so
manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and
the fool. We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their
stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains. They already
dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toil and
dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the
loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men
emancipated by training and culture.

The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the
standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of
the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact
and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.
Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must
persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of
culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign
human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks
a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate
and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and