as other men, to protect
him against injustice and to safeguard his interests in the
administration of law; secondly, that through education and social
organization he be trained to work, and save, and earn a decent living.
But these are not all: wealth is not the only thing worth accumulating;
experience and knowledge can be accumulated and handed down, and no
people can be truly rich without them. Can the Negro do without these?
Can this training in work and thrift be truly effective without the
guidance of trained intelligence and deep knowledge--without that same
efficiency which has enabled modern peoples to grapple so successfully
with the problems of the Submerged Tenth? There must surely be among
Negro leaders the philanthropic impulse, the uprightness of character
and strength of purpose, but there must be more than these; philanthropy
and purpose among blacks as well as among whites must be guided and
curbed by knowledge and mental discipline--knowledge of the forces of
civilization that make for survival, ability to organize and guide those
forces, and realization of the true meaning of those broader ideals of
human betterment which may in time bring heaven and earth a little
nearer. This is social power--it is gotten in many ways by experience,
by social contact, by what we loosely call the chances of life. But the
systematic method of acquiring and imparting it is by the training of
youth to thought, power, and knowledge in the school and college. And
that group of people whose mental grasp is by heredity weakest, and
whose knowledge of the past is for historic reasons most imperfect, that
group is the very one which needs above all, for the talented of its
youth, this severe and careful course of training; especially if they
are expected to take immediate part in modern competitive life, if they
are to hasten the slower courses of human development, and if the
responsibility for this is to be in their own hands.

Three things American slavery gave the Negro--the habit of work, the
English language, and the Christian religion; but one priceless thing it
debauched, destroyed, and took from him, and that was the organized
home. For the sake of intelligence and thrift, for the sake of work and
morality, this home-life must be restored and regenerated with newer
ideals. How? The normal method would be by actual contact with a higher
home-life among his neighbors, but this method the social separation of
white