s it? The late Prof. William Graham Summer
of Yale said that it was because they did not regard the Negro as a man.

And the whole slavery debate hinged on the question of the humanity of the
Negro, hinged upon the question as to whether he possessed the
intellectual, ethical, aesthetical and religious potentialities and
possibilities which white men possessed, hinged upon the question as to
whether the Negro did or did not possess a soul. The South said that the
Negro was a beast and not a man, and was not capable of intellectual or
moral improvement. In Georgia and other states, they took particular pains
to see that the Negro had no chance or opportunity for mental improvement.
In Georgia they would fine and imprison a white man and whip and imprison
a colored man who was caught teaching a slave to read and write.

The great Calhoun said that "The Negro race was so inferior that it had
never produced a single individual who could conjugate a Greek verb." Dr.
Crummell in his paper before the American Negro Academy upon "The Attitude
of the American Mind Towards the Negro Intellect," wittily said that
Calhoun must have expected Greek verbs to grow in Negro brains by some
process of spontaneous generation, as he never had tried the experiment of
putting a Greek grammar in the hands of a Negro student.

But ere long arose Dr. Blyden, the linguist and Arabic scholar; Prof.
Scarborough, who wrote a Greek text book and "The Bird of Aristophanes"
and the "Thematic Vowel in the Greek Verb;" Dr. Grimke, the theologian;
Prof. Kelly Miller, the mathematician, arose. Colored students of Harvard
like Greener, Grimke, DuBois, Trotter, Stewart, Bruce, Hill and Locke, and
Bouchet, McGuinn, Faduma, Baker, Crawford and Pickens of Yale arose, who
demonstrated every kind of intellectual capacity. Then Trumbull of Brown,
Forbes and Lewis of Amherst, Wright of the University of Pennsylvania, and
Hoffman and Wilkinson of Ann Arbor University, also won honors. Dr. Daniel
Williams distinguished himself as a surgeon, Dunbar as a poet, Chestnut as
a novelist, Tanner as an artist, and Coleridge Taylor as a musician.

So in the days when the American Negro Academy came into existence, the
Bourbons of the south and their northern sympathizers realized that the
Negro had achieved distinction in intellectual fields, where they said he
would be like fish out of water.

So then they changed their tack. They then said that the Negro could be
educate