w, 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 impractical 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
black world with adequate standards of human culture and lofty ideals of
life. It was not enou