We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow blogger.com more The following is an excerpt from a chapter titled “The Propaganda of History” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s influential book Black Reconstruction in America.. How the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed Nov 14, · Whistleblower definition essay the on work reflective essay folk black of cycle essay? - Gibbs social dubois souls web, proposal sample essays, essay about preventing drug use and abuse, essay on the best book i have read essay about state of the nation address, spanish phrases for essays: romeo and juliet power of love essay essay
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The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by web dubois essay exceptional men. The web dubois essay of education, then, web dubois essay, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.
Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate task, web dubois essay. Its technique is a matter for educational experts, web dubois essay, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-training, web dubois essay, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men.
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life, web dubois essay.
If this be true—and who can deny it—three tasks lay before me; first to show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly to show how these men may be educated and developed; and thirdly to show their relation to the Negro problem. You misjudge us because you do not know us. From the very first it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, web dubois essay, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership?
Negro leadership therefore sought from the first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Then came Dr. James Derham, who could tell even the learned Dr. Rush something of web dubois essay, and Lemuel Haynes, to whom Middlebury College gave an honorary A.
in These and others we may call the Revolutionary group of distinguished Negroes — they were persons of marked ability, leaders of a Talented Tenth, standing conspicuously among the best of their time, web dubois essay. They strove by word and deed to save the color line from becoming the line between the bond and free, but all they could do was nullified by Eli Whitney and the Curse of Gold.
So they passed into forgetfulness, web dubois essay. But their spirit did not wholly die; here and there in the early part of the century came other exceptional men. There was Ira Aldridge, whom all Europe loved to honor; there was that Voice crying in the Wilderness, David Walker, and saying:, web dubois essay. I ask every man who has a heart, web dubois essay, and is blessed with the privilege of believing— Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures?
Do you say he is? Then if he gives peace and tranquility to tyrants and permits them to keep our fathers, our mothers, ourselves and our children in eternal ignorance and wretchedness to support them and their families, would he be to us a God web dubois essay Justice?
I ask, O, ye Christians, who hold us and our children in the web dubois essay abject ignorance and degradation that ever a people were afflicted with since the world began—I say if God gives you peace and tranquility, web dubois essay, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and our children, who have never given you the least provocation — would He be to us a God of Justice? If you will allow that we are men, who feel for each other, does not the blood of our fathers and of us, their children, cry web dubois essay to theLord of Sabaoth against you for the cruelties and murders with which you have and do web dubois essay to afflict us?
This was the wild voice that first aroused Southern legislators in to the terrors of abolitionism. Too little notice has web dubois essay taken of the work which the Talented Tenth among Negroes took in the great abolition crusade. There was Purvis and Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and Alexander Crummel, and above, Frederick Douglass—what would the abolition movement have been without them?
They stood as living examples of the possibilities of the Negro race, their own hard experiences and well wrought culture said silently more than all the drawn periods of orators—they were the men who made American slavery impossible. It has equally implanted hopes and aspirations, noble thoughts, and sublime purposes, in the hearts of both races. It has prepared the white man for the freedom of the black man, and it has made the black man scorn the thought of enslavement, as does a white man, as far as its influence has extended.
Strengthen that noble influence! Before its organization, the country only saw here and there in slavery some faithful Cudjoe or Dinah, whose strong natures blossomed even in bondage, like a fine plant beneath a heavy stone.
Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the noblest temples. Where were these black abolitionists trained? Some, like Frederick Douglass, were self-trained, but yet trained liberally; others, like Alexander Crummell and McCune Smith, web dubois essay, graduated from famous foreign universities.
Most of them rose up through the colored schools of New York and Philadelphia web dubois essay Boston, taught by college-bred men like Russworm, web dubois essay, of Dartmouth, and college-bred white men like Neau and Benezet. After emancipation web dubois essay a new group of educated and giftedleaders: Langston, Bruce and Elliot, Greener, Williams and Payne.
Through political organization, historical and polemic writing and moral regeneration, these men strove to uplift their people.
It is the fashion of to-day to sneer at them and to say that with freedom Negro leadership should have begun at the plow and not in the Senate—a web dubois essay and mischievous lie; two hundred and web dubois essay years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling was in vain till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred and fifty years more the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow, but unless he have political rights and righteously guarded civic status, he will still remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything of rascals, that he now is.
This all sane men know even if they dare not say it. And so we come to the present—a day of cowardice and vacillation, of strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced dallying with Truth and Right, web dubois essay.
Who are to-day guiding the work of the Negro people? But not even this was able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk, web dubois essay.
A saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; web dubois essay shows the capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in web dubois essay land a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised, web dubois essay, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, web dubois essay, 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?
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 uprisen 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 web dubois essay 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, web dubois essay.
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, web dubois essay, and thus in the beginning were the favored sons of the freedmen trained. Out of the colleges of the North came, after the blood of war, Ware, web dubois essay, Cravath, Chase, Andrews, Bumstead and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and civilization in the black South.
Where ought they to have begun to build? At the bottom, of course, quibbles the mole with web dubois essay eyes in the earth. truly at the bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge, down in the very depths of knowledge there where the roots of justice strike into the lowest soil of Truth. It was a miracle — the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper way to found a system of education is first to gather the children and buy them spelling books and hoes; afterward men may look about for teachers, if haply they may find them; or again they would teach men Work, but as for Life—why, what has Work to do with Life, they ask vacantly, web dubois essay.
Was the work of these college founders successful; did it stand the test of time? Did the college graduates, with all their fine theories of life, really live? Are they useful men helping to civilize and elevate their less fortunate fellows? Let us see. Omitting all institutions which have not actually graduated students from a web dubois essay course, there are to-day in the United States thirty-four institutions giving something above high school training to Negroes and designed especially for this race.
In most cases the college departments are small adjuncts to high and common schoolwork. As a matter of fact six institutions—Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, web dubois essay, Shaw, Wilberforce and Leland, are the important Negro colleges so far as actual work and number of students are concerned. In all these institutions, seven hundred and fifty Negro college students are enrolled. In grade the best of these colleges are about a year behind the smaller New England colleges and a typical curriculum is that of Atlanta University.
One-fourth of this time is given to Latin and Greek; one-fifth, to English and modern languages; one-sixth, to history and social science; one-seventh, to natural science; one-eighth to mathematics, web dubois essay, and one-eighth to philosophy and pedagogy. In addition to these students in the South, Negroes web dubois essay attended Northern colleges for many years.
As early as one was graduated from Bowdoin College, and from that time till to-day nearly every year has seen elsewhere, other such graduates. They have, of course, met much color prejudice. Fifty years ago very few colleges would admit them at all.
Even to-day no Negro has ever been admitted to Princeton, and at some other leading institutions they are rather endured than encouraged. Oberlin was the great pioneer in the work of blotting out the color line in colleges, and has more Negro graduates by far than any other Northern college. The total number of Negro college graduates up toseveral of the graduates of that year not being reportedwas as follows:.
Of these graduates 2, were men and were women; 50 percent. of Northern-born college men come South to work among the masses of their people, at a sacrifice which few people realize; nearly 90 per cent.
of the Southern-born graduates instead of seeking that personal freedom and broader intellectual atmosphere which their training has led them, in some degree, to conceive, stay and labor and wait in the midst of their black neighbors and relatives. The most interesting question, and in many respects the crucial question, to be asked concerning college-bred Negroes, is: Do they earn a living?
It has been intimated more than once that the higher training of Negroes has resulted in sending into the world of work, men who could find nothing to do suitable to their talents. Now and then there comes a rumor of a colored college man working at menial service, web dubois essay, etc. Fortunately, returns as to occupations of college-bred Negroes, gathered by the Atlanta conference, are quite full—nearly sixty per cent.
of the total number of graduates. This enables us to reach fairly certain conclusions web dubois essay to the occupations of all college-bred Negroes. Of 1, persons reported, there were:. Over half are teachers, a sixth are preachers, another sixth are students and professional men; over 6 per cent, web dubois essay. are farmers, artisans and merchants, and 4 per cent. are in government web dubois essay. In detail the occupations are as follows:. These figures illustrate vividly the function of the college-bred Negro.
He is, as he ought to be, the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads its social movements. It need hardly be web dubois essay that the Negro people need social leadership more than most groups; that they have no traditions to fall back upon, no long established customs, no strong family ties, no well defined social classes.
All these things must be slowly and painfully evolved. The preacher was, web dubois essay, even before the war, the group leader of the Negroes, and the church their greatest social institution.
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