chasm at the
color-line across which men pass at their peril. Thus, then and now,
there stand in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply
in the higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and
school, on railway and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets
and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in
hospitals and graveyards. There is still enough of contact for large
economic and group cooperation, but the separation is so thorough and
deep that it absolutely precludes for the present between the races
anything like that sympathetic and effective group-training and
leadership of the one by the other, such as the American Negro and all
backward peoples must have for effectual progress.

This the missionaries of '68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and
trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a
common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools
could be founded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern
whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers
could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself,
and the most effective help that could be given him was the
establishment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was
slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until
simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or
systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to
furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the
obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing
rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black
teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of
the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.

Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader
development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then some
became high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one
year or more of studies of college grade. This development was reached
with different degrees of speed in different institutions: Hampton is
still a high school, while Fisk University started her college in 1871,
and Spelman Seminary about 1896. In all cases the aim was
identical,--to maintain the standards of the lower training by giving
teachers and leaders the best practicable training; and above all, to
furnish the bla