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 Lincoln, Biddle, 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:--

"IN 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 CHIL-
DREN'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 their places where
the filth of 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, studies and worked, hoped and
harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum
was doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme,
for it was the contact of livi