fellow students in
New England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying that nowhere have
I met men and women with a broader spirit of helpfulness, with deeper
devotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated determination to
succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than among Negro college-bred
men. They have, to be sure, their proportion of ne'er-do-weels,
their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small
proportion of them; they have not that culture of manner which we
instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality
it is the heritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation
removed from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and
gaucherie, despite the best of training.

With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have
usually been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldom been
agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have
worked steadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the South.
As teachers they have given the South a commendable system of city
schools and large numbers of private normal schools and academies.
Colored college-bred men have worked side by side with white college
graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone of
Tuskegee's teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and
Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled with college graduates, from
the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacher of agriculture,
including nearly half of the executive council and a majority of the
heads of departments. In the professions, college men are slowly but
surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing the
devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for
the liberty and property of the toiling masses. All this is needful
work. Who would do it if Negroes did not? How could Negroes do it if
they were not trained carefully for it? If white people need colleges to
furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need
nothing of the sort?

If it be true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the
land capable by character and talent to receive that higher training,
the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half thousand who
have had something of this training in the past have in the main proved
themselves useful to their race and generation, the question then
comes, What place in the