o do college work, the work in some
cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality
has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher
education throughout the land; it is the almost inevitable incident of
educational growth, and leaves the deeper question of the legitimate
demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched. And this latter
question can be settled in but one way,--by a first-hand study of the
facts. If we leave out of view all institutions which have not
actually graduated students from a course higher than that of a New
England high school, even though they be called colleges; if then we
take the thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up many
misapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are
they? what do they teach? and what sort of men do they graduate?

And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta,
Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, is
peculiar, almost unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before
me as I write, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England granite,
covering a grave, which graduates of Atlanta University have placed
there,--

"GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER
AND FRIEND AND OF THE UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED,
AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT THEY,
THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN
MIGHT BE BLESSED."

This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a
friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money these
seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts
beating with red blood;--a gift which to-day only their own kindred and
race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to
their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing
in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid
greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in these institutions came not
to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the
defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. The colleges
they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons
of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best
traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and
worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal
content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in
e