, then, is the plain
thirst for training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to
knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside
their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of
water?

No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and
more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more
intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so
largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such
waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with
civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and
skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more
and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present,
until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found
energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the
Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the
moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against
them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic,
have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O
Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who
brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage,
they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic
concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their
vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may
reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black
women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two
millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally,
when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer
that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin
abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which
in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South,
and West.

I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,--I will not insist
that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the
nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of
the cradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in
the guise of terrible truth. I insist that the question of the future
is how best to keep these millions from brood