d, but education made him "a builder of air castles," in the words
of their colored spokesman, and made him useless to his own people. They
barred the educated Negro from employment in keeping with his natural
tastes and aptitudes and previous training and inclination, and then said
that he couldn't make a living. They said the Negro was mentally inferior
to the Anglo-Saxons and then reduced the curriculum in the state colleges
and high schools to keep him mentally inferior.

At the same time, they encouraged the Negro churches and looked with favor
upon laboring men and washerwomen using their hard earned savings to erect
costly churches. Why did they look cross-eyed at and frown at the higher
education of the Negro, which they said made him impractical, while they
smiled and looked with satisfaction at his religion, which they didn't
take seriously, but regarded as a dope? Why did they emphasize education
and minimize religion for white men, and on the other hand minimize
education and emphasize religion for black men? Why did they set up Yale
and Harvard Universities as the white's ideal of education and Hampton and
Tuskegee as the colored man's ideal?

These Bourbons of the south and their northern sympathizers had a definite
propaganda and programme regarding the Negro. Their plan was to reduce the
colored race to a race of hewers of wood and drawers of water, to
disfranchise the Negro, run him out of Congress and lucrative political
jobs in the south, to jim-crow him and segregate him. They knew that
religion would act as a narcotic and opiate and that it would keep his
eyes and mind centered upon the golden streets, jeweled pavements,
sapphire walls and white-robed angels of the New Jerusalem, while they
were robbing him of the civil and political rights which were won on the
battlefields of the Civil War and guaranteed by the Constitution of the
United States.

They knew that to educate him would be to open his eyes, to cause him to
think and to prevent his being camouflaged. They knew that to educate him
would be to make him dissatisfied with his lot at the bottom of the
ladder. They knew that to educate him would introduce the leaven of divine
discontent into his being. They knew that to educate him would cause him
to aspire to something higher than hard labor or menial service. They knew
that to educate him would cause him to know that robbing him of the ballot
was reducing him to a pariah in American life a