er things? This clarion note, though still for the
nonce, shall not become a lost chord. Its inspiring tones must again
appeal to the youth to arise to their higher assertion and exertion. If
you wish to reach and inspire the life of the people, the approach must
be made not to the intellectual, nor yet to the feelings, as the final
basis of appeal, but to the manhood that lies back of these. That
education of youth, especially the suppressed class, that does not make
insistent and incessant appeals to the smothered manhood (I had almost
said godhood) within, will prove to be but vanity and vexation of
spirit. What boots a few chapters in Chemistry, or pages in History, or
paragraphs in Philosophy, unless they result in an enlarged appreciation
of one's own manhood? Those who are to stand in the high places of
intellectual, moral, and spiritual leadership of such a people in such a
time as this must be made to feel deep down in their own souls their own
essential manhood. They must believe that they are created in the image
of God and that nothing clothed in human guise is a more faithful
likeness of the original. This must be the dominant note in the
education of the Negro. If the note itself is not new, there must at
least be a newness of emphasis and insistence. The Negro must learn in
school what the white boy absorbs from association and environment. The
American white man in his ordinary state is supremely conscious of his
manhood prerogative. He may be ignorant or poor or vicious; yet he never
forgets that he is a man. But every feature of our civilization is
calculated to impress upon the Negro a sense of his inferiority and to
make him feel and believe that he is good for nothing but to be cast out
and trodden under foot of other men. A race, like an individual, that
compromises its own self-respect, paralyzes and enfeebles its own
energies. The motto which should be engraved upon the conscience of
every American Negro is that which Milton places in the mouth of His
Satanic Majesty: "The mind is its own place and of itself can make a
heaven of hell; a hell of heaven." To inculcate this principle is the
highest mission of the higher education. The old theologians used to
insist upon the freedom of the will, but the demand of the Negro to-day
is for the freedom and independence of his own spirit. Destroy this and
all is lost; preserve it, and though political rights, civil privileges,
industrial opportunities be ta