The Souls of Black Folk ......................................................................................................................................1

W. E. B. Du Bois.....................................................................................................................................1

The Forethought .......................................................................................................................................1

I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings....................................................................................................................2

II. Of the Dawn of Freedom .....................................................................................................................6

III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others......................................................................................15

IV. Of the Meaning of Progress .............................................................................................................22

V. Of the Wings of Atalanta..................................................................................................................26

VI. Of the Training of Black Men.........................................................................................................31

VII. Of the Black Belt ...........................................................................................................................38

VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece ................................................................................................46

IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man .......................................................................................................55

X. Of the Faith of the Fathers................................................................................................................64

XI. Of the Passing of the FirstBorn.....................................................................................................70

XII. Of Alexander Crummell .................................................................................................................73

XIII. Of the Coming of John ..................................................................................................................77

XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs .....................................................................................................................85

The Afterthought ....................................................................................................................................90

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here

at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the

problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. I pray you, then, receive my little book in

all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is

I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand

Americans live and strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to them, and

what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and

criticized candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race today. Then, in two other chapters I

have sketched in swift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central

problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I have in two chapters studied the

struggles of the massed millions of the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the present

relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil,

raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human

sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written,

Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other guise. For kindly consenting to their

republication here, in altered and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, The

World's Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social

Science. Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,some echo of haunting

melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I

add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, All night long crying with a mournful cry, As I lie and listen,

and cannot understand The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea, O water, crying for rest, is it

Unresting water, there shall never be rest Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail, And the fire of the

end begin to burn in the west; And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, All life long

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of

delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They

approach me in a half hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying

directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I

fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am

interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,peculiar even for one who has never been anything else,

save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first

bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little

thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and

Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy

gorgeous visiting cardsten cents a packageand exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall

newcomer, refused my card, refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain

suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out

from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all

beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That

sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examinationtime, or beat them at a footrace, or even beat

their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and

all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all,

I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by

telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, some way. With other black boys the strife was not so

fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them

and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast

and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prisonhouse closed round about us all: walls strait and

stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on

in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of

seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with secondsight in this American world, a world which yields

him no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a

peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of

others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever

feels his twoness,an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring

ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,this longing to attain selfconscious

manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older

selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a

message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,

without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a coworker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and

isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in

the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the

tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash

here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here

in America, in the few days since Emanci pation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and

doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like

weakness. And yet it is not weakness,it is the contradiction of double aims. The doubleaimed struggle of

the black artisanon the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and

drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a povertystricken horde could only

result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and

ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by

the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The wouldbe black

savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice told tale to his

white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and

blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people adancing and asinging

raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the

soulbeauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another

people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc

with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,has sent them often wooing false

gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and

disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American

Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all

villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of

sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one

refrainLiberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it

came,suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in

Years have passed away since then,ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal

and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised

land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests

upon the Negro people,a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely

to elude their grasp,like a tantalizing willo'thewisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The

holocaust of war, the terrors of the KuKlux Klan, the lies of carpetbaggers, the disorganization of industry,

and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the

old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded

for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he

had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting

the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and

emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that

had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the

decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the halffree serf weary, wondering, but still

inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of

political power,a pow erful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of

fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of "booklearning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory

ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at

last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation

and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and

guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know

how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote

down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one

had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always

dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no restingplace, little but flattery and

criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and selfexamination; it changed the child of

Emancipation to the youth with dawning selfconsciousness, selfrealization, selfrespect. In those sombre

forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,darkly as through a veil; and yet he

saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to

attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the

burden he bore upon his back, that deadweight of social degradation partially masked behind a halfnamed

Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had

entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race

in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,not simply of

letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of

decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red

stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his

race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of

corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time

and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his

prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men

call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism,

learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro

cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization,

culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless

prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and wellnigh speechless; before that

personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton

license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the

allpervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil, before this

there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable selfquestioning, selfdisparagement,

and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate.

Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark

hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve?

And the Nation echoed and enforced this selfcriticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more;

what need of higher culture for halfmen? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud,and behold

the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good, the more careful adjustment of

education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities, and the sobering

So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress today rocks our little boat on the mad waters of

the world sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul;

inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past,physical

freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,all these in turn have waxed and

waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,all false? No, not that, but each

alone was oversimple and incomplete,the dreams of a credulous racechildhood, or the fond imaginings

of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these

ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need today more than ever,the

training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds

and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer selfdefence,else what shall save us from a

second slavery? Freedom, too, the longsought, we still seek,the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to

work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,all these we need, not singly but

together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal

that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of

Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or

contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in

order that some day on American soil two worldraces may give each to each those characteristics both so

sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether emptyhanded: there are today no truer

exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is

no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore

are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a

dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering

with lighthearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the

spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of

their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers'

And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with

loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colorline,the relation of the darker to the

lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem

that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on

the technical points, of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the

question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question

ever forced itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched

Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,What shall be done with

Negroes? Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation

Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro

It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American

Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called the

Freedmen's Bureau,one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had

the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines.

They came at night, when the flickering campfires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon:

old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry

children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable,

in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of

minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to

work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler's action was approved,

but Fremont's was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. "Hereafter," he

commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come without your

knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them." Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the

black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their masters had deserted them, and still

others were captured with forts and plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to the

Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers. "They constitute a military resource," wrote

Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; "and being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too

plain to discuss." So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of

fugitives, and Butler's "contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers. This complicated rather than solved

the problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies

Then the longheaded man with carechiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and

emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro

soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled

and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring:

"What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and

It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus became in a sense the founder of the Freedmen's

Bureau. He was a firm friend of Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandoned lands

devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially detailed from the ranks to study the conditions.

First, he cared for the refugees at Fortress Monroe; and then, after Sherman had captured Hilton Head, Pierce

was sent there to found his Port Royal experiment of making free workingmen out of slaves. Before his

experiment was barely started, however, the problem of the fugitives had assumed such proportions that it

was taken from the hands of the overburdened Treasury Department and given to the army officials.

Already centres of massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New Orleans, Vicksburg

and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well as at Port Royal. Army chaplains found here new and

fruitful fields; "superintendents of contrabands" multiplied, and some attempt at systematic work was made

Then came the Freedmen's Aid societies, born of the touching appeals from Pierce and from these other

centres of distress. There was the American Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad, and now

fullgrown for work; the various church organizations, the National Freedmen's Relief Association, the

American Freedmen's Union, the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission,in all fifty or more active

organizations, which sent clothes, money, schoolbooks, and teachers southward. All they did was needed,

for the destitution of the freedmen was often reported as "too appalling for belief," and the situation was daily

And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter of temporary relief, but a national crisis;

for here loomed a labor problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they worked

spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received pay, squandered the new thing

thoughtlessly. In these and other ways were camplife and the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The

broader economic organization thus clearly demanded sprang up here and there as accident and local

conditions determined. Here it was that Pierce's Port Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen

pointed out the rough way. In Washington the military governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent,

opened confiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome gathered

black farm villages. General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and

West. The government and benevolent societies furnished the means of cultivation, and the Negro turned

again slowly to work. The systems of control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange little

governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty

thousand guided laborers, and its annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out four

thousand payrolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired into grievances and redressed them, laid and

collected taxes, and established a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of

Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand

acres of cotton land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was General Saxton, with his

deep interest in black folk. He succeeded Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased

abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman, after that terribly picturesque march

Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's raid through Georgia, which threw the new

situation in shadowy relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in the

grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor

fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those

swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they

ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged,

until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the

characteristic military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned ricefields along the rivers

for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set

apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war." So read the celebrated "Fieldorder

All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and perplex the government and the nation.

Directly after the Emancipation Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a Bureau of

Emancipation; but it was never reported. The following June a committee of inquiry, appointed by the

Secretary of War, reported in favor of a temporary bureau for the "improvement, protection, and employment

of refugee freedmen," on much the same lines as were afterwards followed. Petitions came in to President

Lincoln from distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan of

dealing with the freedmen, under a bureau which should be "charged with the study of plans and execution of

measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and humanely aiding, the passage of our

emancipated and yet to be emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new state of

Some halfhearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by putting the whole matter again in charge

of the special Treasury agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and lease abandoned

lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to "provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the

employment and general welfare" of the freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted this as a welcome relief

from perplexing "Negro affairs," and Secretary Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of

regulations, which were afterward closely followed by General Howard. Under Treasury agents, large

quantities of land were leased in the Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were em ployed; but in August,

1864, the new regulations were suspended for reasons of "public policy," and the army was again in control.

Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in March the House passed a bill by a

majority of two establishing a Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who had charge

of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned lands ought to be under the same department,

and reported a substitute for the House bill attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed,

but too late for action by the House. The debates wandered over the whole policy of the administration and

the general question of slavery, without touching very closely the specific merits of the measure in hand.

Then the national election took place; and the administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the

country, addressed itself to the matter more seriously. A conference between the two branches of Congress

agreed upon a carefully drawn measure which contained the chief provisions of Sumner's bill, but made the

proposed organization a department independent of both the War and the Treasury officials. The bill was

conservative, giving the new department "general superintendence of all freedmen." Its purpose was to

"establish regulations" for them, protect them, lease them lands, adjust their wages, and appear in civil and

military courts as their "next friend." There were many limitations attached to the powers thus granted, and

the organization was made permanent. Never theless, the Senate defeated the bill, and a new conference

committee was appointed. This committee reported a new bill, February 28, which was whirled through just

as the session closed, and became the act of 1865 establishing in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees,

This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and uncertain in outline. A Bureau was created, "to

continue during the present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereaf ter," to which was given "the

supervision and management of all abandoned lands and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and

freedmen," under "such rules and regu lations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and approved

by the President." A Commissioner, appointed by the President and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with

an office force not exceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint assistant commissioners in the

seceded States, and to all these offices military officials might be detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of

War could issue rations, cloth ing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned property was placed in the

hands of the Bureau for eventual lease and sale to exslaves in fortyacre parcels.

Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the emancipated Negro as the ward of the

nation. It was a tremendous undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of millions of

men,and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by a pecu liarly complete system of slavery,

centuries old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in

the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters. Any man might well have

hesitated to assume charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite powers, and limited

resources. Probably no one but a soldier would have answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a

soldier could be called, for Congress had appropriated no money for salaries and expenses.

Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his successor assigned MajorGen. Oliver

O. How ard to duty as Commissioner of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then only thirtyfive years

of age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at Gettysburg, and but the year before had

been assigned to the command of the Department of Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in

human nature, little aptitude for business and intricate detail, he had had large opportunity of becoming

acquainted at first hand with much of the work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that "no

approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as

one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and administration of the

On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the duties of his office promptly on the 15th, and

began exam ining the field of work. A curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic

experiments, slavery, peonage, busi ness speculations, organized charity, unorganized almsgiving, all

reeling on under the guise of helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and

the cursing and silence of angry men. On May 19 the new governmentfor a government it really

wasissued its constitution; commissioners were to be appointed in each of the seceded states, who were to

take charge of "all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen," and all relief and rations were to be given by

their consent alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with benevolent societies, and declared: "It

will be the object of all commissioners to introduce practicable systems of compensated labor," and to

establish schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were ap pointed. They were to hasten to their

fields of work; seek gradually to close relief establishments, and make the desti tute selfsupporting; act as

courts of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized in them as free; establish the

institution of marriage among exslaves, and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their

employers, and help in making fair contracts for them; and finally, the circular said: "Simple good faith, for

which we hope on all hands for those concerned in the passing away of slavery, will especially relieve the

assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the freedmen, as well as promote the general

No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local organization in some measure begun,

than two grave difficulties appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work. First,

there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of

the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the

forfeited lands of their masters,a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose

meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast appropriations. Now Congress

had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight

hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. The

second difficulty lay in perfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide field of work.

Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform

is no child's task; but this task was even harder, for a new central organization had to be fitted on a

heterogeneous and confused but already existing system of relief and control of exslaves; and the agents

available for this work must be sought for in an army still busy with war operations,men in the very nature

of the case ill fitted for delicate social work,or among the questionable camp followers of an invading host.

Thus, after a year's work, vigorously as it was pushed, the problem looked even more difficult to grasp and

solve than at the beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year's work did, well worth the doing: it relieved a

vast amount of physical suffering; it transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the

farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England schoolma'am.

The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written, the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far

more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico

dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the

alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of

more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and

black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand souls, and

Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hast ily organized Bureau, which had so quickly

grown into wide significance and vast possibilities. An institution such as that was wellnigh as difficult to

end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a

bill to extend the Bureau and enlarge its powers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress, far more

thorough discussion and attention than its predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer

concep tion of the work of Emancipation. The champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of the

Freedmen's Bureau was still a military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of the

Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the exslave, at a trifling cost to the government.

The opponents of the measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war measures past; that

the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was

destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of possibly hundreds of millions.

These two arguments were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the ex traordinary powers of

the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that the government must have power to do

what manifestly must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical re

enslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made permanent the Freedmen's Bureau. It was

promptly vetoed by President Johnson as "unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and "extrajudicial," and failed of

passage over the veto. Mean time, however, the breach between Congress and the Presi dent began to

broaden, and a modified form of the lost bill was finally passed over the President's second veto, July 16.

The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau its final form,the form by which it will be known to posterity

and judged of men. It extended the existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional assistant

commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regular service, the sale of certain forfeited

lands to freedmen on nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a wider

field of judicial interpretation and cogni zance. The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put

very largely in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military

com mander was now made also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen's Bureau became a

fullfledged gov ernment of men. It made laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected

taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such mea sures as it

thought necessary and proper for the accomplish ment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were

not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, "scarcely any

subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or another, to demand the action of

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in

the later sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; the

Thirteenth Amend ment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870.

Guerrilla raiding, the everpresent flickering afterflame of war, was spending its forces against the Negroes,

and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time

of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an

as sured and selfsustaining place in the body politic and eco nomic would have been a herculean task; but

when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of

conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside

Bereavement,in such a case, the work of any instru ment of social regeneration was in large part

foredoomed to failure. The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries

and better men had refused even to argue,that life amid free Negroes was simply un thinkable, the

The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to

narrowminded busy bodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the aver age was far better than

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered be tween friend and foe. He had emerged from

slavery,not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that

had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,but withal slavery, which, so far as

human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro knew

full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate

energy to perpetuate this slavery under which the black masses, with halfarticulate thought, had writhed and

shivered. They wel comed freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for their chains;

they fled to the friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to use them as a club for

driving the recalcitrant South back into loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to

say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements

were left arrayed against each other,the North, the government, the carpetbagger, and the slave, here; and

there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, hon est man or rascal, lawless murderer

Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human

passions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming

ages,the one, a grayhaired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in

nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood

at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;and the other, a form hovering

dark and mother like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white

master's command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the

sunken eyes of his wife,aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny

manchild to the world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding

after "damned Nig gers." These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands of

these two passing figures of the presentpast; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their

Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen's Bureau; and since, with some hesitation, it was

continued by the act of 1868 until 1869, let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in

1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling, directly and indirectly,

many millions of men. The deeds of these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical

suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying and selling of land, the establishment of

schools, the paying of bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all these activities.

Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty

hospi tals and asylums had been in operation. In fifty months twenty one million free rations were

distributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the difficult question of labor. First, thirty

thousand black men were transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the

critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must be free

to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be no peonage or forced

labor. So far, so good; but where local agents differed toto caelo in capacity and character, where the

personnel was continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied. The largest element of suc cess

lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmen were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were

written, fifty thousand in a single State,laborers advised, wages guaranteed, and employers supplied. In

truth, the organiza tion became a vast labor bureau,not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and there,

but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men. The two great obstacles which confronted

the officials were the tyrant and the idler,the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery under

another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest,the Devil and the Deep Sea.

In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant propri etors, the Bureau was from the first handicapped

and at last absolutely checked. Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned lands were

leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of nearly half a million dollars

derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained title were sold on easy terms,

and public lands were opened for settlement to the very few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the

vision of "forty acres and a mule"the righteous and rea sonable ambition to become a landholder, which

the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmenwas des tined in most cases to bitter

disappointment. And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to

the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro

peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau had to go

to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that

there was a mistake somewhere. If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three hundred and fifty

thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift rather than by bounty of the government.

The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and the

idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South. It not only called the schoolmistresses

through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such

apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to

Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South

believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education

among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of

dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. Perhaps some inkling of this paradox, even

in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the bayonets allay an opposition to human training which still

today lies smouldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded in

these days, and six million dollars were expended for educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand

Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other enterprises, showed that the exslave

was han dling some free capital already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and his pay

and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at first complicated by the ignorance of the

recipients, and the fact that the quotas of colored regiments from Northern States were largely filled by

recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers. Consequently, payments were accompanied by

such frauds that Congress, by joint resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the Freedmen's

Bureau. In two years six million dollars was thus distributed to five thousand claim ants, and in the end the

sum exceeded eight million dollars. Even in this system fraud was frequent; but still the work put needed

The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bu reau's work lay in the exercise of its judicial

functions. The regular Bureau court consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the Negro, and

one of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly judicial attitude, this arrangement would

have been ideal, and must in time have gained confidence; but the nature of its other activities and the

character of its personnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and led without doubt to much

injustice and annoyance. On the other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts was

impossible. In a distracted land where slavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the

weak, and the weak from gloating insolently over the halfshorn strength of the strong, was a thankless,

hopeless task. The former masters of the land were peremptorily ordered about, seized, and impris oned, and

punished over and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The former slaves were intimidated, beaten,

raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for

punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely institu tions for perpetuating the

slavery of blacks. Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to

reduce the Negroes to serfdom,to make them the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the

Bureau officials too often were found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and gave the freedmen a power

and independence which they could not yet use. It is all well enough for us of another generation to wax wise

with advice to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see that the man who

lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by "mules and niggers," was really

benefited by the passing of slavery. It is not difficult now to say to the young freedman, cheated and cuffed

about who has seen his father's head beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the meek

shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient than to heap on the Freedmen's Bureau all the

evils of that evil day, and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made.

All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone had blundered, but that was long before Oliver

Howard was born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of control

there would have been far more than there was. Had that control been from within, the Negro would have

been reenslaved, to all intents and pur poses. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men and

methods would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents and questionable methods, the work

Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed up in brief,

may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole of

benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant

proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common

school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of goodwill between exmasters

and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic meth ods which discouraged selfreliance, and to

carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes

were the result of hard work, sup plemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black

men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.

Such an institution, from its wide powers, great re sponsibilities, large control of moneys, and generally

con spicuous position, was naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searching

Congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Its archives and few remaining

functions were with blunt discourtesy transferred from Howard's control, in his absence, to the supervision of

Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary's rec ommendation. Finally, in consequence of grave

intimations of wrongdoing made by the Secretary and his subordinates, General Howard was

courtmartialed in 1874. In both of these trials the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau was officially

exonerated from any wilful misdoing, and his work commended. Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were

brought to light,the methods of transacting the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of

defalcation were proved, and other frauds strongly suspected; there were some business transactions which

savored of dangerous specula tion, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the smirch of the Freedmen's

Morally and practically, the Freedmen's Bank was part of the Freedmen's Bureau, although it had no legal

connection with it. With the prestige of the government back of it, and a directing board of unusual

respectability and national reputa tion, this banking institution had made a remarkable start in the

development of that thrift among black folk which slavery had kept them from knowing. Then in one sad day

came the crash,all the hardearned dollars of the freedmen disap peared; but that was the least of the

loss,all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which

today sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could

have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series

of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to

say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish friends or the dark

machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never reveal, for here lies un written history.

Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked not so much its conduct or policy under

the law as the necessity for any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the Border States and

the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky, when he moved to entitle the act of

1866 a bill "to promote strife and conflict between the white and black races . . . by a grant of

unconstitutional power." The argument gathered tremen dous strength South and North; but its very strength

was its weakness. For, argued the plain commonsense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and

futile for the nation to stand guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,to make

those wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot. Moreover, the path of the practical politician

pointed the same way; for, argued this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white

The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible

man, black and white, would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between suffrage and

slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern

legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature

believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there

was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Eman cipation as a crime, and its

practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a

necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the

South to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And

some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity;

Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to government guardianship of Negroes less bitter,

and the attachment to the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far better policy,a

permanent Freedmen's Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment

and labor office; a system of impar tial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social

betterment as savingsbanks, land and building associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure

of money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we

That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau

itself. It came to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present

perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and proteges led it far afield into questionable

activities, until the South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the

Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul,

but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage of

this generation. Today, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind

and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know:

despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles

and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in wellnigh the whole rural South the black farmers

are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the

penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste,

with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and

peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is,

and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, the

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women

wanton with harvest. And there in the King's Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the

traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the

raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed.

Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr.

Booker T. Wash ington. It began at the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of

astonishing commercial devel opment was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation over took the

freedmen's sons,then it was that his leading began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite

programme, at the psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much

sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars. His programme of in dustrial

education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights, was not

wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830 up to wartime had striven to build industrial schools, and the

American Mission ary Association had from the first taught various trades; and Price and others had sought

a way of honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners. But Mr. Washington first indis solubly linked

these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect faith into his programme, and changed it from

a bypath into a veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the methods by which he did this is a fascinating study

It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme after many decades of bitter complaint; it

startled and won the applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a

confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.

To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various ele ments comprising the white South was Mr.

Washington's first task; and this, at the time Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, wellnigh

impossible. And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: "In all things purely social we

can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." This

"Atlanta Compromise" is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington's career. The South

interpreted it in dif ferent ways: the radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and

political equality; the conserva tives, as a generously conceived working basis for mutual understanding. So

both approved it, and today its author is certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis,

Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington's work in gaining place and consideration in the North.

Others less shrewd and tactful had formerly essayed to sit on these two stools and had fallen between them;

but as Mr. Washington knew the heart of the South from birth and training, so by singular insight he

intuitively grasped the spirit of the age which was dominating the North. And so thoroughly did he learn the

speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a

lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to

him the acme of absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say to this.

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough one ness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It

is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington's cult has

gained unquestion ing followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his friends are legion, and his

enemies are confounded. Today he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and

one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life

which, beginning with so little, has done so much. And yet the time is come when one may speak in all

sincerity and utter cour tesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career, as well as of his

triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier to do ill than well

The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always been of this broad character. In the South

especially has he had to walk warily to avoid the harshest judgments, and naturally so, for he is dealing

with the one subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section. Twiceonce when at the Chicago celebration of

the SpanishAmerican War he alluded to the colorprejudice that is "eating away the vitals of the South,"

and once when he dined with President Roosevelthas the resulting Southern criticism been violent enough

to threaten seriously his popularity. In the North the feeling has several times forced itself into words, that

Mr. Washington's counsels of submission overlooked certain ele ments of true manhood, and that his

educational programme was unnecessarily narrow. Usually, however, such criticism has not found open

expression, although, too, the spiritual sons of the Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowl edge that

the schools founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and selfsacrificing spirit, were wholly failures

or worthy of ridicule. While, then, criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing

public opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the solution of a wearisome problem into his

Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has encountered the strongest and most lasting opposition,

amount ing at times to bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent even though largely

silenced in outward expres sion by the public opinion of the nation. Some of this opposi tion is, of course,

mere envy; the disappointment of displaced demagogues and the spite of narrow minds. But aside from this,

there is among educated and thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow,

and apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington's theories have

gained. These same men admire his sincerity of purpose, and are willing to forgive much to honest endeavor

which is doing something worth the doing. They cooperate with Mr. Washington as far as they

conscientiously can; and, indeed, it is no ordinary tribute to this man's tact and power that, steering as he must

between so many diverse interests and opinions, he so largely retains the respect of all.

But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the

critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and

intemperately as to lose lis teners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose inter ests are most nearly

touched,criticism of writers by readers, this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern

society. If the best of the American Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized

before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss,a loss of that

peculiarly valuable educa tion which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and

commissions its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and the nicest

problem of social growth. History is but the record of such group leadership; and yet how infinitely

changeful is its type and character! And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive than the

leadership of a group within a group? that curious double movement where real progress may be negative

and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this is the social student's inspiration and despair.

Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in the choosing of group leaders,

founding thus a peculiar dynasty which in the light of present conditions is worth while studying. When

sticks and stones and beasts form the sole environment of a people, their attitude is largely one of determined

opposition to and conquest of natural forces. But when to earth and brute is added an environment of men and

ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms,a feeling of revolt and revenge;

an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at

selfrealization and selfdevelopment despite environing opinion. The influ ence of all of these attitudes at

various times can be traced in the history of the American Negro, and in the evolution of his successive

Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom still burned in the veins of the slaves, there was in all

leadership or attempted leadership but the one motive of revolt and revenge, typified in the terrible

Maroons, the Danish blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all the Americas in fear of insurrection. The

liberalizing tendencies of the latter half of the eighteenth century brought, along with kindlier relations

between black and white, thoughts of ultimate adjustment and assimilation. Such aspiration was especially

voiced in the earnest songs of Phyllis, in the martyrdom of Attucks, the fighting of Salem and Poor, the

intellectual accomplishments of Banneker and Derham, and the political demands of the Cuffes.

Stern financial and social stress after the war cooled much of the previous humanitarian ardor. The

disappointment and impatience of the Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in two

movements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors of the Haytian revolt, made three

fierce attempts at insurrection,in 1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in

1831 again in Virginia under the terrible Nat Turner. In the Free States, on the other hand, a new and curious

attempt at selfdevelopment was made. In Philadelphia and New York colorprescription led to a withdrawal

of Negro communicants from white churches and the formation of a peculiar socioreligious institution

among the Negroes known as the African Church,an organization still living and con trolling in its

Walker's wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the world was changing after the coming of

the cotton gin. By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed

into submission. The free Negroes of the North, inspired by the mulatto immigrants from the West Indies,

began to change the basis of their demands; they recognized the slavery of slaves, but insisted that they

themselves were freemen, and sought assimilation and amalgamation with the nation on the same terms with

other men. Thus, Forten and Purvis of Philadelphia, Shad of Wilmington, Du Bois of New Haven, Barbadoes

of Boston, and others, strove singly and together as men, they said, not as slaves; as "people of color," not as

"Negroes." The trend of the times, however, refused them recognition save in individual and exceptional

cases, considered them as one with all the despised blacks, and they soon found themselves striving to keep

even the rights they formerly had of voting and working and moving as freemen. Schemes of migration and

colonization arose among them; but these they refused to entertain, and they eventually turned to the

Here, led by Remond, Nell, WellsBrown, and Douglass, a new period of selfassertion and

selfdevelopment dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but

the assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown's raid

was the extreme of its logic. After the war and eman cipation, the great form of Frederick Douglass, the

greatest of American Negro leaders, still led the host. Selfassertion, especially in political lines, was the

main programme, and behind Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston, and the Reconstruction politicians,

and, less conspicuous but of greater social significance, Alexander Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne.

Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of the Negro votes, the changing and shifting of ideals,

and the seeking of new lights in the great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the ideals of

his early manhood, ultimate assimilation through selfassertion, and on no other terms. For a time Price

arose as a new leader, destined, it seemed, not to give up, but to restate the old ideals in a form less

repugnant to the white South. But he passed away in his prime. Then came the new leader. Nearly all the

former ones had become leaders by the silent suffrage of their fellows, had sought to lead their own people

alone, and were usually, save Douglass, little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington arose as

essentially the leader not of one race but of two,a compromiser between the South, the North, and the

Negro. Naturally the Negroes resented, at first bitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered their civil and

politi cal rights, even though this was to be exchanged for larger chances of economic development. The

rich and dominating North, however, was not only weary of the race problem, but was investing largely in

Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method of peaceful cooperation. Thus, by national opin ion, the

Negroes began to recognize Mr. Washington's lead ership; and the voice of criticism was hushed.

Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old atti tude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment

at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic development,

and Mr. Washing ton's programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and

Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover,

this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and

the racefeeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washing ton's programme practically accepts the alleged

inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given

impetus to raceprejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of

Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro's tendency to

selfassertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of

nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly selfrespect is

worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving

In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only through submission. Mr. Washington

distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,

Third, higher education of Negro youth, and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and

accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently

advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of

3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but his propaganda has,

without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible,

and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of

political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for develop ing their

exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic NO. And

1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and propertyowners; but it is utterly

impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property owners to defend their rights

2. He insists on thrift and selfrespect, but at the same time counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority

3. He advocates commonschool and industrial training, and depreciates institutions of higher learning; but

neither the Negro commonschools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers

This triple paradox in Mr. Washington's position is the object of criticism by two classes of colored

Americans. One class is spiritually descended from Toussaint the Savior, through Gabriel, Vesey, and Turner,

and they represent the attitude of revolt and revenge; they hate the white South blindly and distrust the white

race generally, and so far as they agree on definite action, think that the Negro's only hope lies in emigration

beyond the borders of the United States. And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has more effectually made this

programme seem hopeless than the recent course of the United States toward weaker and darker peoples in

the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines,for where in the world may we go and be safe from lying and

The other class of Negroes who cannot agree with Mr. Washington has hitherto said little aloud. They

deprecate the sight of scattered counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they dislike making their

just criticism of a useful and earnest man an excuse for a general discharge of venom from smallminded

opponents. Nevertheless, the questions in volved are so fundamental and serious that it is difficult to see

how men like the Grimkes, Kelly Miller, J. W. E. Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can much

longer be silent. Such men feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things:

3. The education of youth according to ability. They acknowledge Mr. Washington's invaluable service in

counselling patience and courtesy in such demands; they do not ask that ignorant black men vote when

ignorant whites are debarred, or that any reasonable restrictions in the suffrage should not be applied; they

know that the low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against it, but

they also know, and the nation knows, that relentless colorprejudice is more often a cause than a result of

the Negro's degradation; they seek the abatement of this relic of barbarism, and not its systematic

encouragement and pampering by all agencies of social power from the Associ ated Press to the Church of

Christ. They advocate, with Mr. Washington, a broad system of Negro common schools sup plemented by

thorough industrial training; but they are sur prised that a man of Mr. Washington's insight cannot see that

no such educational system ever has rested or can rest on any other basis than that of the wellequipped

college and univer sity, and they insist that there is a demand for a few such institutions throughout the

South to train the best of the Negro youth as teachers, professional men, and leaders.

This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitude of conciliation toward the white South; they accept

the "At lanta Compromise" in its broadest interpretation; they recog nize, with him, many signs of

promise, many men of high purpose and fair judgment, in this section; they know that no easy task has been

laid upon a region already tottering under heavy burdens. But, nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth

and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in indis criminate flattery; in praising those of the South who

do well and criticising uncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand

and urging their fel lows to do the same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to

their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility. They do not

expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not

expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely

certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and

insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling

and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season,

that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need

In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally the legiti mate demands of their people, even at the cost of

opposing an honored leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would shirk a heavy

responsibility,a responsibility to them selves, a responsibility to the struggling masses, a responsi bility

to the darker races of men whose future depends so largely on this American experiment, but especially a

respon sibility to this nation,this common Fatherland. It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in

evildoing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so. The

growing spirit of kindliness and reconcilia tion between the North and South after the frightful difference of

a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratula tion to all, and especially to those whose

mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic

death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black

men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a

course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T.

Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to

First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly. The present generation of Southerners

are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no

class is the indis criminate endorsement of the recent course of the South toward Negroes more nauseating

than to the best thought of the South. The South is not "solid"; it is a land in the ferment of social change,

wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is

just as wrong as to condemn the good. Discriminating and broadminded criticism is what the South

needs,needs it for the sake of her own white sons and daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy

Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the

same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the moneymakers

wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward develop ment, while

othersusually the sons of the masterswish to help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last

class to maintain the Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially in property, life, and limb.

Through the pres sure of the moneymakers, the Negro is in danger of being reduced to semislavery,

especially in the country districts; the workingmen, and those of the educated who fear the Negro, have

united to disfranchise him, and some have urged his deportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily

aroused to lynch and abuse any black man. To praise this intricate whirl of thought and prejudice is nonsense;

to in veigh indiscriminately against "the South" is unjust; but to use the same breath in praising Governor

Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing with Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, and denouncing Senator Ben

It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed

movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama

constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his

influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to

assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first, that the South is

justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime

cause of the Negro's failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his

future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous halftruth. The

supplementary truths must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and raceprejudice are potent if not sufficient

causes of the Negro's position; second, industrial and common school training were necessarily slow in

planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions,it being extremely

doubtful if any essentially different develop ment was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable

before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help

himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged,

by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success.

In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is especially to be criticised. His doctrine

has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's

shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the

nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the

race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The Northher co partner in guiltcannot salve her

conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by "policy"

alone. If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of

The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate,a forward movement to

oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and

Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and

glorying in the strength of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr.

Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting,

belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our

brighter minds,so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,we must unceasingly and firmly oppose

them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men,

clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these

truths to be selfevident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain

unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the broad dark vale of the Mississippi

begins to roll and crumple to greet the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought that

Tennesseebeyond the Veilwas theirs alone, and in vacation time they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet

the county schoolcommissioners. Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not soon forget that summer,

First, there was a Teachers' Institute at the countyseat; and there distinguished guests of the superintendent

taught the teachers fractions and spelling and other mysteries,white teachers in the morning, Negroes at

night. A picnic now and then, and a supper, and the rough world was softened by laughter and song. I

There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and began the hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay

(for my mother was mortally afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is wonderfully

interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never hunted a country school has something to learn of the

pleasures of the chase. I see now the white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and wind before me under the

burning July sun; I feel the deep weariness of heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles stretch relentlessly ahead;

I feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and again, "Got a teacher? Yes." So I walked on and onhorses

were too expensiveuntil I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a land of "varmints" and

rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an event, and men lived and died in the shadow of one blue

Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from the world by the forests and the rolling

hills toward the east. There I found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin, homely girl of

twenty, with a darkbrown face and thick, hard hair. I had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under

the great willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was resting on her way to town.

The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a

school over the hill; that but once since the war had a teacher been there; that she herself longed to

learn,and thus she ran on, talking fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.

Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the blue and yellow mountains stretching

toward the Caro linas, then plunged into the wood, and came out at Josie's home. It was a dull frame cottage

with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid peachtrees. The father was a quiet, simple

soul, calmly ignorant, with no touch of vulgarity. The mother was different,strong, bustling, and energetic,

with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition to live "like folks." There was a crowd of children. Two boys

had gone away. There remained two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John, tall, awkward, and eighteen;

Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking; and two babies of indefinite age. Then there was Josie herself. She

seemed to be the centre of the family: always busy at service, or at home, or berrypicking; a little nervous

and inclined to scold, like her mother, yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain fineness,

the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life broader,

deeper, and fuller for her and hers. I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for their

honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with

them no affectation. The mother would scold the father for being so "easy"; Josie would roundly berate the

boys for carelessness; and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky sidehill.

I secured the school. I remember the day I rode horseback out to the commissioner's house with a pleasant

young white fellow who wanted the white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed

and the water jingled, and we rode on. "Come in," said the commissioner,"come in. Have a seat. Yes, that

certificate will do. Stay to dinner. What do you want a month?" "Oh," thought I, "this is lucky"; but even then

The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail

fence and thorn bushes, near the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door once was, and

within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A

pale blackboard crouched in the corner. My desk was made of three boards, reinforced at critical points, and

my chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for the childrenthese puzzled

me much. I was haunted by a New England vision of neat little desks and chairs, but, alas! the reality was

rough plank benches without backs, and at times without legs. They had the one virtue of making naps

It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened. I trembled when I heard the patter of little feet

down the dusty road, and saw the growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. First

came Josie and her brothers and sisters. The longing to know, to be a student in the great school at Nashville,

hovered like a star above this childwoman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly. There were

the Dowells from their farm over toward Alexandria,Fanny, with her smooth black face and wondering

eyes; Martha, brown and dull; the pretty girlwife of a brother, and the younger brood.

There were the Burkes,two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny haughtyeyed girl. Fat Reuben's little

chubby girl came, with golden face and oldgold hair, faithful and sol emn. 'Thenie was on hand early,a

jolly, ugly, goodhearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and looked after her little bow legged brother. When

her mother could spare her, 'Tildy came,a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering limbs; and her

brother, correspondingly homely. And then the big boys,the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfa

thered sons of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders; and the rest.

There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their faces shading from a pale cream to a deep

brown, the little feet bare and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a twinkle of

mischief, and the hands grasping Webster's blueblack spellingbook. I loved my school, and the fine faith

the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvellous. We read and spelled together, wrote a

little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill. At times the school would

dwindle away, and I would start out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask

why little Lugene, whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the darkred hair uncombed, was absent all

last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked Colonel

Wheeler's farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose

face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the baby. "But we'll start them again next

week." When the Lawrences stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about booklearning had

conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far into the cabin as possi ble, I put Cicero "pro

Archia Poeta" into the simplest En glish with local applications, and usually convinced themfor a week or

On Friday nights I often went home with some of the children,sometimes to Doc Burke's farm. He was a

great, loud, thin Black, ever working, and trying to buy the seventy five acres of hill and dale where he

lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and the "white folks would get it all." His wife was a

magnificent Amazon, with saffron face and shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the children were

strong and beautiful. They lived in a oneandahalf room cabin in the hollow of the farm, near the spring.

The front room was full of great fat white beds, scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the walls,

and a tired centre table. In the tiny back kitchen I was often invited to "take out and help" myself to fried

chicken and wheat biscuit, "meat" and corn pone, stringbeans and berries. At first I used to be a little

alarmed at the approach of bedtime in the one lone bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly avoided.

First, all the children nodded and slept, and were stowed away in one great pile of goose feathers; next, the

mother and the father discreetly slipped away to the kitchen while I went to bed; then, blowing out the dim

light, they retired in the dark. In the morning all were up and away before I thought of awaking. Across the

road, where fat Reuben lived, they all went outdoors while the teacher retired, because they did not boast the

I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and plenty of good country fare. Uncle Bird had a

small, rough farm, all woods and hills, miles from the big road; but he was full of tales,he preached now

and then,and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was happy and prosperous. Often, to keep the

peace, I must go where life was less lovely; for instance, 'Tildy's mother was incorrigibly dirty, Reuben's

larder was limited seriously, and herds of untamed insects wandered over the Eddingses' beds. Best of all I

loved to go to Josie's, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie

had bought the sewingmachine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that four dollars a month was

"mighty little" wages; how Josie longed to go away to school, but that it "looked like" they never could get

far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how "mean"

For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful

longing, and the boys fretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was "town,"a straggling, lazy village of

houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the

north was the village of the colored folks, who lived in three or fourroom unpainted cottages, some neat

and homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but they centred about the twin

temples of the hamlet, the Methodist, and the HardShell Baptist churches. These, in turn, leaned gingerly on

a sad colored schoolhouse. Hither my little world wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet other worlds,

and gossip, and won der, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest at the altar of the "oldtime

religion." Then the soft melody and mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half

awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a

common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung

between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts to gether; but these, when ripe for

speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes twentyfive and more years before had seen

"the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring

all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of

childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it

ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless

indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, somesuch as Josie, Jim, and

Bento whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to

an edge by school and story and halfawakened thought. Ill could they be con tent, born without and

beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers,barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at

The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization comes that life is leading

somewhere,these were the years that passed after I left my little school. When they were past, I came by

chance once more to the walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel of melody. As I lingered there in

the joy and pain of meeting old schoolfriends, there swept over me a sudden longing to pass again beyond

the blue hill, and to see the homes and the school of other days, and to learn how life had gone with my

Josie was dead, and the grayhaired mother said simply, "We've had a heap of trouble since you've been

away." I had feared for Jim. With a cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made

a venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here he was, angry with life and reckless; and when

Fanner Durham charged him with stealing wheat, the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which the

furious fool hurled after him. They told Jim to run away; but he would not run, and the constable came that

afternoon. It grieved Josie, and great awkward John walked nine miles every day to see his little brother

through the bars of Lebanon jail. At last the two came back together in the dark night. The mother cooked

supper, and Josie emptied her purse, and the boys stole away. Josie grew thin and silent, yet worked the more.

The hill became steep for the quiet old father, and with the boys away there was little to do in the valley.

Josie helped them to sell the old farm, and they moved nearer town. Brother Dennis, the carpenter, built a

new house with six rooms; Josie toiled a year in Nashville, and brought back ninety dollars to furnish the

When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud and full, little sister Lizzie, bold and

thought less, flushed with the passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home a

nameless child. Josie shiv ered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and

tired,worked until, on a summer's day, some one married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt

I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley. The Lawrences have gone,father and son forever,and

the other son lazily digs in the earth to live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat Reuben. Reuben

is a Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever, though his cabin has three rooms; and little Ella has

grown into a bouncing woman, and is ploughing corn on the hot hillside. There are babies aplenty, and one

halfwitted girl. Across the valley is a house I did not know before, and there I found, rocking one baby and

expecting another, one of my schoolgirls, a daugh ter of Uncle Bird Dowell. She looked somewhat worried

with her new duties, but soon bristled into pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thrifty husband, and

My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.

The crazy foundation stones still marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on six

weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by thirty feet, with three windows and a door

that locked. Some of the window glass was broken, and part of an old iron stove lay mourn fully under the

house. I peeped through the window half reverently, and found things that were more familiar. The

blackboard had grown by about two feet, and the seats were still without backs. The county owns the lot now,

I hear, and every year there is a session of school. As I sat by the spring and looked on the Old and the New I

After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double loghouse on the corner. I remembered the

broken, blighted family that used to live there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its wilderness of

hair, rose before me. She had driven her husband away, and while I taught school a strange man lived there,

big and jovial, and people talked. I felt sure that Ben and 'Tildy would come to naught from such a home. But

this is an odd world; for Ben is a busy farmer in Smith County, "doing well, too," they say, and he had cared

for little 'Tildy until last spring, when a lover married her. A hard life the lad had led, toiling for meat, and

laughed at because he was homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint, who had

definite notions about "niggers," and hired Ben a summer and would not pay him. Then the hungry boy

gathered his sacks together, and in broad daylight went into Carlon's corn; and when the hard fisted farmer

set upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke saved a murder and a lynching that day.

The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impa tience seized me to know who won in the battle,

Doc or the seventyfive acres. For it is a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I

hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain magnificent barba rism about them that I

liked. They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconven tionality

that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the

misborn Neill boys. It was empty, and they were grown into fat, lazy farmhands. I saw the home of the

Hickmans, but Albert, with his stooping shoulders, had passed from the world. Then I came to the Burkes'

gate and peered through; the enclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and yet there were the same fences

around the old farm save to the left, where lay twenty five other acres. And lo! the cabin in the hollow had

The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt. Indeed, the gaunt father who toiled night and day

would scarcely be happy out of debt, being so used to it. Some day he must stop, for his massive frame is

showing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the lionlike physique of other days was broken. The children

had grown up. Rob, the image of his father, was loud and rough with laughter. Birdie, my school baby of six,

had grown to a picture of maiden beauty, tall and tawny. "Edgar is gone," said the mother, with head half

Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me horseback down the creek next morning toward

Farmer Dowell's. The road and the stream were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it. We

splashed and waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered and laughed. He showed me where

Simon Thompson had bought a bit of ground and a home; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl,

was not there. She had married a man and a farm twenty miles away. We wound on down the stream till we

came to a gate that I did not recognize, but the boy insisted that it was "Uncle Bird's." The farm was fat with

the growing crop. In that little valley was a strange stillness as I rode up; for death and marriage had stolen

youth and left age and childhood there. We sat and talked that night after the chores were done. Uncle Bird

was grayer, and his eyes did not see so well, but he was still jovial. We talked of the acres bought,one

hundred and twentyfive,of the new guest chamber added, of Martha's marrying. Then we talked of

death: Fanny and Fred were gone; a shadow hung over the other daughter, and when it lifted she was to go to

Nashville to school. At last we spoke of the neighbors, and as night fell, Uncle Bird told me how, on a night

like that, 'Thenie came wandering back to her home over yonder, to escape the blows of her husband. And

next morning she died in the home that her little bowlegged brother, working and saving, had bought for

My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and Death. How shall man measure Progress

there where the darkfaced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How

hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and

South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of

the past into the promise of the future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day had

halfroused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia; then the blue smoke began to curl from

her chimneys, the tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly

gathered and swelled, until the seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.

Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foothills of the Alleghanies, until the iron baptism

of war awakened her with its sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea. And

the sea cried to the hills and the hills answered the sea, till the city rose like a widow and cast away her

weeds, and toiled for her daily bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly,perhaps with some bitterness, with a

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into

real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black

day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to

know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean,

something less than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have

Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned resolutely toward the future; and that future

held aloft vistas of purple and gold:Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta, Gateway to the Land of

the Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and woof for the world. So the city crowned her hundred

hills with factories, and stored her shops with cunning handiwork, and stretched long iron ways to greet the

Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull Boeotia; you know the tale,how swarthy

Atalanta, tall and wild, would marry only him who outraced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid three

apples of gold in the way. She fled like a shadow, paused, startled over the first apple, but even as he

stretched his hand, fled again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew over river,

vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the third, his arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the

blazing passion of their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. If Atlanta be not named

Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has led to defile the temple of Love; and not

maids alone, but men in the race of life, sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the gambler's code

of the Bourse; and in all our Nation's striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay? So

common is this that onehalf think it normal; so unquestioned, that we almost fear to question if the end of

racing is not gold, if the aim of man is not rightly to be rich. And if this is the fault of America, how dire a

danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta, stooping for mere gold, shall find that gold

It was no maiden's idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful wilderness lay about the feet of that city

after the War,feudalism, poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serf dom, the rebirth of Law and Order,

and above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey for weary feet! what wings must Atalanta

have to flit over all this hollow and hill, through sour wood and sullen water, and by the red waste of

sunbaked clay! How fleet must Atalanta be if she will not be tempted by gold to profane the Sanctuary!

The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods, some sneer, "all too few." There is the thrifty

Mercury of New England, Pluto of the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the halfforgotten

Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,and as she ran she forgot him, even as there in

Boeotia Venus was forgot. She forgot the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,that newworld heir of the

grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor with his foibles, his kindliness with his

carelessness, and stooped to apples of gold,to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more unscrupulous.

Golden apples are beautifulI remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold

tempted me over fence and fieldand, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no despicable

parvenu. Work and wealth are the mighty levers to lift this old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the

highways to new hopes and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily Hippomenes tempt

Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.

Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the

fatal might of this idea is beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar

moneygetters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern life beneath pretence and ostentation. For every

social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged,wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism;

wealth to raise the "cracker" Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to

keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and,

finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.

Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is threatening to be true of a world beneath and

beyond that world,the Black World beyond the Veil. Today it makes little difference to Atlanta, to the

South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the soullife of the land he is today, and naturally will

long remain, unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and will and do for

himself,and let no man dream that day will never come,then the part he plays will not be one of sudden

learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his racechildhood. Today the ferment of his

striving toward selfrealization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the

Veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and

subordination, and, through all, the Veil of Race. Few know of these problems, few who know notice them;

and yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer, a field for somebody sometime to discover. Hither

has the temptation of Hippomenes penetrated; already in this smaller world, which now indirectly and anon

directly must influence the larger for good or ill, the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars. The

old leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups where there is a Negro social consciousness, are being

replaced by new; neither the black preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades ago. Into their

places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the wellpaid porters and artisans, the businessmen,all

those with property and money. And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the Otherworld,

goes too the same inevitable change in ideals. The South laments today the slow, steady disappearance of a

certain type of Negro, the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his incor ruptible honesty and

dignified humility. He is passing away just as surely as the old type of Southern gentleman is passing, and

from not dissimilar causes,the sudden transformation of a fair faroff ideal of Freedom into the hard

In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this peoplethe strife for another

and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but today the danger is that

these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust

for gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes

be still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some

ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples before her? What if the Negro people be

wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of know ing, to regard dollars as the beall and endall

of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mam monism of the reborn South, and

the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half wakened black

millions? Whither, then, is the newworld quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering? Must

this, and that fair flower of Freedom which, despite the jeers of latterday striplings, sprung from our fathers'

blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of gold,into lawless lust with Hippomenes?

The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories. On one, toward the west, the setting sun

throws three buildings in bold relief against the sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple unity:a

broad lawn of green rising from the red street and mingled roses and peaches; north and south, two plain and

stately halls; and in the midst, half hidden in ivy, a larger building, boldly graceful, spar ingly decorated,

and with one low spire. It is a restful group, one never looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible. There I

live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of restful life. In winter's twilight, when the red sun glows,

I can see the dark figures pass between the halls to the music of the nightbell. In the morning, when the sun

is golden, the clang of the daybell brings the hurry and laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and

street, and from the busy city below,children all dark and heavyhaired,to join their clear young voices

in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a halfdozen classrooms they gather then,here to follow the

lovesong of Dido, here to listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the stars, there to wander

among men and nations,and elsewhere other wellworn ways of knowing this queer world. Nothing new,

no timesav ing devices,simply old timeglorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the

hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that

was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium,

and is today laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change;

its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the

true college will ever have one goal,not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat

The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing mean or selfish. Not at Oxford or at

Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia, is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the

determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and

the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,all this is the burden of their talk and

dream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and proscription, amid the hearthurting slights and jars and

vagaries of a deep race dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools, and the bitterness of

disappointment is sweetened by the springs and breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and

They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard and Atlanta before the smoke of battle had

lifted; they made their mistakes, but those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat

uproariously. They were right when they sought to found a new educational system upon the University:

where, forsooth, shall we ground knowl edge save on the broadest and deepest knowledge? The roots of the

tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and from the dawn of history, from Academus to

Cambridge, the culture of the University has been the broad foundation stone on which is built the

But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of the problem before them; in thinking it a

matter of years and decades; in therefore building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly, and

lowering the standard of know ing, until they had scattered haphazard through the South some dozen poorly

equipped high schools and miscalled them universities. They forgot, too, just as their successors are

forgetting, the rule of inequality:that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig;

that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and

that true training meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made

a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other a free workman among serfs. And to seek to

make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread winning, or to furnish teachers for the public

schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real

life and the growing knowl edge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civiliza tion. Such an

institution the South of today sorely needs. She has religion, earnest, bigoted:religion that on both sides

the Veil often omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth command ments, but substitutes a dozen supplementary

ones. She has, as Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil; but she lacks that broad knowledge of what

the world knows and knew of human living and doing, which she may apply to the thousand problems of real

life today confronting her. The need of the South is knowledge and culture,not in dainty limited quantity,

as before the war, but in broad busy abun dance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the

Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from the curse of the Boeotian lovers.

The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of the South. They alone can bear the maiden past the

temptation of golden fruit. They will not guide her flying feet away from the cotton and gold; forah,

thoughtful Hippomenes!do not the apples lie in the very Way of Life? But they will guide her over and

beyond them, and leave her kneeling in the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, virgin and

undefiled. Sadly did the Old South err in human education, despising the education of the masses, and nig

gardly in the support of colleges. Her ancient university foundations dwindled and withered under the foul

breath of slavery; and even since the war they have fought a failing fight for life in the tainted air of social

unrest and commercial selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism, and starving for lack of broadly cultured

men. And if this is the white South's need and danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the

freedmen's sons! how pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the conservation of soul from

sordid aims and petty passions! Let us build the Southern university William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia,

Texas, Tulane, Vander bilt, and the othersfit to live; let us build, too, the Negro universities:Fisk,

whose foundation was ever broad; How ard, at the heart of the Nation; Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of

scholarship has been held above the temptation of numbers. Why not here, and perhaps elsewhere, plant

deeply and for all time centres of learning and living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the

South a few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability, joining

their hands to other hands, and giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?

Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and kindergartens, industrial and technical schools,

literature and tolerance,all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university. So must

Teach workers to work,a wise saying; wise when applied to German boys and American girls; wiser when

said of Negro boys, for they have less knowledge of working and none to teach them. Teach thinkers to

think,a needed knowl edge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose lot is gravest must have

the carefulest training to think aright. If these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for

one or seven or sixty million souls! shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and both:

teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of

philoso phers, and fops of fools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living group

of men,nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist

nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of

living,not sordid moneygetting, not ap ples of gold. The worker must work for the glory of his

handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by

human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth

on the unham pered search for Truth; by founding the common school on the university, and the industrial

school on the common school; and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an

When night falls on the City of a Hundred Hills, a wind gathers itself from the seas and comes murmuring

westward. And at its bidding, the smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the mighty city and

covers it like a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle above Stone Hall. And they say that yon

gray mist is the tunic of Atalanta pausing over her golden apples. Fly, my maiden, fly, for yonder comes

From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago the slaveship first saw the square

tower of Jamestown, have flowed down to our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the larger

world here and over seas, saying, the multiplying of human wants in culturelands calls for the worldwide

cooperation of men in satisfying them. Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and

all men, black, yellow, and white. The larger humanity strives to feel in this contact of living Nations and

sleeping hordes a thrill of new life in the world, crying, "If the contact of Life and Sleep be Death, shame on

such Life." To be sure, behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force and dominion,the making of

The second thought streaming from the deathship and the curving river is the thought of the older

South,the sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium

quid, and called it a Negro,a clown ish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limita tions, but

straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,some of

them with favoring chance might become men, but in sheer selfdefence we dare not let them, and we build

about them walls so high, and hang between them and the light a veil so thick, that they shall not even think

And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought,the thought of the things themselves, the

confused, halfconscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying "Liberty, Freedom,

Opportunityvouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!" To be sure, behind the thought

lurks the afterthought,suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad

So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black

men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of

their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the

Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us

shadows at once grotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we

have within our threshold,a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semitropics; if, deaf to the voice of the

Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized by

the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains

in the future as in the past, what shall save us from national deca dence? Only that saner selfishness, which

Again, we may decry the colorprejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the

human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully

stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone.

They must be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of civilization and

religion and common decency. They can be met in but one way,by the breadth and broadening of human

reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even

though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and

untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish

crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The guiding of thought and the deft coordina tion of deed is

And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and partially contradictory streams of thought, the one

panacea of Education leaps to the lips of all:such human training as will best use the labor of all men

without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us poise to encourage the prejudices that bulwark

society, and to stamp out those that in sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil,

But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle straight, what have we uttered but a

truism? Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and

white? A hundred and fifty years ago our task would have seemed easier. Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured

us that education was needful solely for the embellishments of life, and was useless for ordinary vermin.

Today we have climbed to heights where we would open at least the outer courts of knowledge to all,

display its treasures to many, and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not wholly by birth

or the accidents of the stock market, but at least in part according to deftness and aim, talent and character.

This programme, however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that part of the land where the

blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we are dealing with two backward peoples. To make here in human

education that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the contingentof the ideal and the

practical in workable equilibriumhas been there, as it ever must be in every age and place, a matter of

In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of work in Southern education since the Civil

War. From the close of the war until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief. There

were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen's Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking

system and co operation. Then followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the building of

complete school systems in the South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for the freedmen, and

teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was the inevitable tendency of war to underestimate

the prejudices of the master and the ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage

of the storm. Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from 1885 to 1895, began the

industrial revolution of the South. The land saw glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The

educational system striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a field of work ever broader and deeper.

The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of varying

efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools were doing little more than commonschool work, and the

common schools were training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and training these too

often poorly. At the same time the white South, by reason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by

so much the more became set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and crys tallized it into harsh law and

harsher custom; while the mar vellous pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to take even bread

and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons of the freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger

problem of Negro education sprang up the more practi cal question of work, the inevitable economic

quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom, and especially those who make that

The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to full recognition in the decade

beginning with 1895, was the proffered answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an

answer of singular wisdom and time liness. From the very first in nearly all the schools some attention had

been given to training in handiwork, but now was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct

touch with the South's magnificent industrial develop ment, and given an emphasis which reminded black

Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the temporary and the contingent in the

Negro problem to the broader question of the permanent uplifting and civili zation of black men in America,

we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height, if after all the

industrial school is the final and suffi cient answer in the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in

all sincerity, the everrecurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than

raiment? And men ask this today all the more eagerly be cause of sinister signs in recent educational

movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of

the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to

future dividends. Raceprejudices, which keep brown and black men in their "places," we are coming to

regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the

hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration,

that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than breadwinning, is the

Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational efforts to aid the Negro. In the four

periods I have mentioned, we find first, boundless, planless enthusi asm and sacrifice; then the preparation

of teachers for a vast publicschool system; then the launching and expansion of that school system amid

increasing difficulties; and finally the training of workmen for the new and growing industries. This

development has been sharply ridiculed as a logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we have

been told that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro to work, then simple schools

should have taught him to read and write, and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have

That a system logically so complete was historically impos sible, it needs but a little thought to prove.

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the

lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantageground. Thus it was no accident that gave

birth to universities centuries before the common schools, that made fair Harvard the first flower of our

wilderness. So in the South: the mass of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the intelligence so

necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the common school to teach them to read, write, and

cipher; and they must have higher schools to teach teachers for the common schools. The white teachers who

flocked South went to establish such a commonschool system. Few held the idea of founding col leges;

most of them at first would have laughed at the idea. But they faced, as all men since them have faced, that

central paradox of the South,the social separation of the races. At that time it was the sudden volcanic

rupture of nearly all relations between black and white, in work and government and family life. Since then a

new adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs has grown up,an adjustment subtle and

difficult to grasp, yet singularly ingenious, which leaves still that frightful chasm at the colorline across

which men pass at their peril. Thus, then and now, 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 streetcar,

in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asy lums 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 grouptraining and leadership of the one by the other, such as the American

This the missionaries of '68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and trade schools were impracticable before

the establishment of a commonschool 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 establish ment 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 institu tions 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 trainingschools tended naturally to deepen broader development: at first they were common and

gram mar schools, then some became high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirtyfour 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 train ing

by giving teachers and leaders the best practicable train ing; and above all, to furnish the black world with

adequate standards of human culture and lofty ideals of life. It was not enough that the teachers of teachers

should be trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far as possible, be broadminded, cultured

men and women, to scatter civili zation among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of

It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South began with higher institutions of training, which

threw off as their foliage common schools, and later industrial schools, and at the same time strove to shoot

their roots ever deeper toward college and university training. That this was an inevitable and necessary

development, sooner or later, goes without saying; but there has been, and still is, a question in many minds if

the natural growth was not forced, and if the higher training was not either overdone or done with cheap and

unsound methods. Among white Southerners this feeling is widespread and positive. A prominent Southern

"The experiment that has been made to give the colored students classical training has not been satisfactory.

Even though many were able to pursue the course, most of them did so in a parrotlike way, learning what

was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and import of their instruc tion, and graduating without

sensible aim or valuable oc cupation for their future. The whole scheme has proved a waste of time, efforts,

While most fairminded men would recognize this as ex treme and overdrawn, still without doubt many are

asking, Are there a sufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the undertaking? Are

not too many stu dents prematurely forced into this work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the

young Negro with his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real life? Such natural questions

cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a Nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an

unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patient open ness to conviction. We must not forget that

most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do

The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring

defects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some

cases has not been thor oughly done, and quantity rather than quality 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 un

touched. And this latter question can be settled in but one way,by a firsthand study of the facts. If we

leave out of view all institutions which have not actually graduated stu dents from a course higher than that

of a New England high school, even though they be called colleges; if then we take the thirtyfour remaining

institutions, we may clear up many misapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of insti tutions are

And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta, Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin,

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

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 sympa thy, the pulse of hearts beating with

red blood;a gift which today 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 the defilement of the places

where 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, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal

content their curriculum was doubtless oldfashioned, but in educational power it was supreme, for it was the

From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone forth with the bachelor's degree. The number in

itself is enough to put at rest the argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher

training. If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout the land, in both college and secondary

training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assures us "it must be increased to five times its present average"

Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appre ciable numbers to master a modern college course

would have been difficult to prove. Today it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes, many of whom

have been reported as brilliant students, have received the bachelor's degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and

seventy other leading colleges. Here we have, then, nearly twentyfive hundred Negro gradu ates, of whom

the crucial query must be made, How far did their training fit them for life? It is of course extremely difficult

to collect satisfactory data on such a point,difficult to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and to

gauge that testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of suc cess. In 1900, the Conference at Atlanta

University undertook to study these graduates, and published the results. First they sought to know what these

graduates were doing, and suc ceeded in getting answers from nearly twothirds of the liv ing. The direct

testimony was in almost all cases corroborated by the reports of the colleges where they graduated, so that in

the main the reports were worthy of credence. Fiftythree per cent of these graduates were

teachers,presidents of institu tions, heads of normal schools, principals of city school systems, and the

like. Seventeen per cent were clergymen; another seventeen per cent were in the professions, chiefly as

physicians. Over six per cent were merchants, farmers, and artisans, and four per cent were in the government

civil service. Granting even that a considerable proportion of the third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is

a record of use fulness. Personally I know many hundreds of these graduates, and have corresponded with

more than a thousand; through others I have followed carefully the lifework of scores; I have taught some of

them and some of the pupils whom they have taught, lived in homes which they have builded, and looked at

life through their eyes. Comparing them as a class with my 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 lifework, or with more consecrated determi nation to succeed in the face of bitter

difficulties than among Negro collegebred men. They have, to be sure, their propor tion of ne'erdowells,

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 re moved from slavery can escape a certain

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 normalschools and academies. Col ored

collegebred 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 today 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 prevent ing 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,

If it is 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 future development of the South ought the Negro college and

collegebred man to occupy? That the present social separation and acute racesensitiveness must eventually

yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civi lized, is clear. But such transformation calls for

singular wisdom and patience. If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for

many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual

thought and feeling, yet subtly and si lently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,if this

unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing

intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand

broadminded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment Ameri can civilization

will triumph. So far as white men are con cerned, this fact is today being recognized in the South, and a

happy renaissance of university education seems imminent. But the very voices that cry hail to this good

work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.

Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an

ignorant, turbulent proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothing more:

they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease

attempting to read the riddle of the world. By taking away their best equipped teachers and lead ers, by

slamming the door of opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them

satisfied with their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands of men taught to think to

the hands of untrained demagogues? We ought not to forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite

the active discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for higher training steadily increases

among Negro youth: there were, in the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges;

from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100 graduates. From Southern Negro

colleges there were, in the same three periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst

for training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge, can any sane man imagine that

they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and draw ers of water?

No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day

when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization pre clude the South from being, as it so

largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot he spared if the

South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless

skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping,

crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its newfound energies athwart the

current of advance. Even today the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position

and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their

countercries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not

wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When

you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal mar riage is infinitely better than

systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women,

they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black

women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in

inef faceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that

slavery was the archcrime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color and race are not

crimes, and yet it is they which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and

I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,I will not insist that there is no other side to the shield;

but I do say that of the nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the cradle to whom

these arguments do not daily present themselves in the guise of terrible truth. I insist that the question of the

future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the

present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white

neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future. That one wise method of doing this lies in the closer

knitting of the Negro to the great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this the common

schools and the manual training and trade schools are working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough.

The foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college and university if we

would build a solid, permanent structure. Internal problems of social advance must inevitably come,

problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true valuing of the things of life;

and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for himself,

by reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible solution other than by study and thought and an

appeal to the rich experience of the past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely more

danger to be apprehended from halftrained minds and shallow thinking than from overeducation and

overrefine ment? Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer

successfully between the dilettante and the fool. We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their

stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains. They already dimly perceive that the paths of peace

winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving,

reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated by training and culture.

The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must

seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and

cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. Above our modern socialism, and out of the

worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect;

there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about

it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self development; that will love and hate and labor in its own

way, untrammeled alike by old and new. Such souls afore time have inspired and guided worlds, and if we

be not wholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing of black men must have

respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange

rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, and

doing precious to all human hearts. And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the chance to soar

in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas,

where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing

between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul

I will, and they come all gra ciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the

Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red

hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and

Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare

and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely vil lages, and lean men loafed

leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the

scene; for this is historic ground. Right across our track, three hundred and sixty years ago, wandered the

cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold and the Great Sea; and he and his footsore captives

disappeared yonder in the grim forests to the west. Here sits Atlanta, the city of a hundred hills, with

something Western, something Southern, and something quite its own, in its busy life. Just this side Atlanta is

the land of the Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand

on a spot which is today the centre of the Negro problem,the centre of those nine million men who are

Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in many other respects, both

now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the Union

can count a million Negroes among its citizens,a population as large as the slave population of the whole

Union in 1800; no other State fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of Africans. Oglethorpe

thought slavery against law and gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were

not calculated to furnish citizens overnice in their ideas about rum and slaves. Despite the prohibitions of

the trustees, these Georgians, like some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into their own hands;

and so pliant were the judges, and so flagrant the smuggling, and so earnest were the prayers of Whitefield,

that by the middle of the eighteenth century all restrictions were swept away, and the slavetrade went

Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place some summers ago, there used to come a strong protest

against slavery from the Scotch Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system. But not

till the Haytian Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even checked; while the national statute of 1808 did

not suffice to stop it. How the Africans poured in!fifty thousand between 1790 and 1810, and then, from

Virginia and from smugglers, two thousand a year for many years more. So the thirty thousand Negroes of

Georgia in 1790 doubled in a decade,were over a hundred thousand in 1810, had reached two hundred

thou sand in 1820, and half a million at the time of the war. Thus like a snake the black population writhed

But we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as we near Atlanta is the ancient land of the

Cherokees,that brave Indian nation which strove so long for its fatherland, until Fate and the United States

Government drove them beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to ride with me you must come into the "Jim

Crow Car." There will be no objection, already four other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse,

are in there. Usually the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white. Of course this car is not so

good as the other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable. The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four

We rumble south in quite a businesslike way. The bare red clay and pines of Northern Georgia begin to

disappear, and in their place appears a rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled. This is the

land of the Creek Indians; and a hard time the Georgians had to seize it. The towns grow more frequent and

more interesting, and brandnew cotton mills rise on every side. Below Macon the world grows darker; for

now we approach the Black Belt,that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and

whence come now only faint and halfintelligible murmurs to the world beyond. The "Jim Crow Car" grows

larger and a shade better; three rough fieldhands and two or three white loafers accompany us, and the

newsboy still spreads his wares at one end. The sun is setting, but we can see the great cotton country as we

enter it,the soil now dark and fertile, now thin and gray, with fruittrees and dilapidated buildings, all

At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two hundred miles south of Atlanta, two hundred miles

west of the Atlantic, and one hundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten thousand

Negroes and two thousand whites. The Flint River winds down from Anderson ville, and, turning suddenly

at Albany, the countyseat, hur ries on to join the Chattahoochee and the sea. Andrew Jackson knew the

Flint well, and marched across it once to avenge the Indian Massacre at Fort Mims. That was in 1814, not

long before the battle of New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty that followed this campaign, all Dougherty

County, and much other rich land, was ceded to Georgia. Still, settlers fought shy of this land, for the Indians

were all about, and they were unpleasant neighbors in those days. The panic of 1837, which Jackson

bequeathed to Van Buren, turned the planters from the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and

east Georgia, toward the West. The Indians were removed to Indian Territory, and settlers poured into these

coveted lands to retrieve their broken fortunes. For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a

great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot with the sun and damp with

the rich black swampland; and here the cornerstone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.

Albany is today a widestreeted, placid, Southern town, with a broad sweep of stores and saloons, and

flanking rows of homes,whites usually to the north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the week the town

looks decidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent and prolonged naps. But on Saturday suddenly the

whole county disgorges itself upon the place, and a perfect flood of black peasantry pours through the streets,

fills the stores, blocks the sidewalks, chokes the thoroughfares, and takes full possession of the town. They

are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good natured and simple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more

silent and brooding than the crowds of the Rhinepfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerable

quantities of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly at times, but seldom quarrel or

fight. They walk up and down the streets, meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy

coffee, cheap candy, and clothes, and at dusk drive homehappy? well no, not exactly happy, but much

Thus Albany is a real capital,a typical Southern county town, the centre of the life of ten thousand souls;

their point of contact with the outer world, their centre of news and gossip, their market for buying and

selling, borrowing and lending, their fountain of justice and law. Once upon a time we knew country life so

well and city life so little, that we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded country district. Now the

world has wellnigh forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered

far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land, without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton

It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,a sort of dull, determined heat that seems quite independent

of the sun; so it took us some days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out on the long

country roads, that we might see this unknown world. Finally we started. It was about ten in the morning,

bright with a faint breeze, and we jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the Flint. We passed the

scattered boxlike cabins of the brickyard hands, and the long tenementrow facetiously called "The Ark,"

and were soon in the open country, and on the confines of the great plantations of other days. There is the

"Joe Fields place"; a rough old fellow was he, and had killed many a "nigger" in his day. Twelve miles his

plantation used to run,a regular barony. It is nearly all gone now; only strag gling bits belong to the

family, and the rest has passed to Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged, and,

like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Here is one of them now,a tall brown man, a hard worker and a

hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare. This distressingly new board

house is his, and he has just moved out of yonder mossgrown cabin with its one square room.

From the curtains in Benton's house, down the road, a dark comely face is staring at the strangers; for passing

carriages are not everyday occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a goodsized family,

and manages a planta tion blasted by the war and now the broken staff of the widow. He might be

welltodo, they say; but he carouses too much in Albany. And the halfdesolate spirit of neglect born of the

very soil seems to have settled on these acres. In times past there were cottongins and machinery here; but

The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are the remnants of the vast plantations of the Sheldons, the

Pellots, and the Rensons; but the souls of them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have wholly

disappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are wandering in the world. Strange vicissitudes have

met these whilom masters. Yonder stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in wartime, but the

upstart overseer hastened to wed the widow. Then he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black

tenant remains; but the shadowhand of the master's grandnephew or cousin or creditor stretches out of the

gray distance to collect the rackrent remorselessly, and so the land is uncared for and poor. Only black

tenants can stand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten miles we have ridden today and have

A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields.

This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom,the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the King? Perhaps this

is he,the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres with two lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with

debt. So we sit musing, until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a fairer scene suddenly in

view,a neat cottage snugly en sconced by the road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed man rises from

the porch as we hail him, and comes out to our carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that smiles

gravely. He walks too straight to be a tenant,yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres. "The land is run

down since the boomdays of eighteen hundred and fifty," he explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants

live on his place, and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap, and soda, for the

neighborhood. Here is his ginhouse with new machinery just installed. Three hundred bales of cotton went

through it last year. Two children he has sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but cotton

Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. We

plunge even now into great groves of oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery.

This was the "home house" of the Thompsons,slavebarons who drove their coach and four in the merry

past. All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cotton

industry of the fifties, and with the falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is

another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magno lias, and grassgrown paths. The Big House stands in half

ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its black

tenant. A shabby, wellbuilt Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard to pay rent to the white girl

who owns the remnant of the place. She married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.

Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now, Shepherd's, they call it,a great whitewashed barn

of a thing, perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting here a

moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a

hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near gather here and

talk and eat and sing. There is a school house near,a very airy, empty shed; but even this is an

improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churches vary from loghuts to those like

Shepherd's, and the schools from nothing to this little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny

plankhouse, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row of rough unplaned benches, resting mostly

on legs, sometimes on boxes. Oppo site the door is a square homemade desk. In one corner are the ruins of

a stove, and in the other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have seen in Dougherty, save in

town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodgehouse two stories high and not quite finished. Societies meet

there,societies "to care for the sick and bury the dead"; and these societies grow and flourish.

We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were about to turn west along the countyline, when all

these sights were pointed out to us by a kindly old man, black, white haired, and seventy. Fortyfive years

he had lived here, and now supports himself and his old wife by the help of the steer tethered yonder and the

charity of his black neighbors. He shows us the farm of the Hills just across the county line in Baker,a

widow and two strapping sons, who raised ten bales (one need not add "cotton" down here) last year. There

are fences and pigs and cows, and the softvoiced, velvet skinned young Memnon, who sauntered

halfbashfully over to greet the strangers, is proud of his home. We turn now to the west along the county

line. Great dismantled trunks of pines tower above the green cottonfields, cracking their na ked gnarled

fingers toward the border of living forest beyond. There is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude

abandon that suggests power,a naked grandeur, as it were. The houses are bare and straight; there are no

hammocks or easychairs, and few flowers. So when, as here at Rawdon's, one sees a vine clinging to a little

porch, and homelike windows peeping over the fences, one takes a long breath. I think I never before quite

realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand

scores of ugly oneroom cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and

penury. And here are no fences. But now and then the crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, and

then we know a touch of culture is near. Of course Harrison Gohagen,a quiet yellow man, young,

smoothfaced, and diligent,of course he is lord of some hundred acres, and we expect to see a vision of

wellkept rooms and fat beds and laughing children. For has he not fine fences? And those over yonder, why

should they build fences on the rackrented land? It will only increase their rent.

On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of old plantations, till there creeps into sight a cluster of

buildings, wood and brick, mills and houses, and scattered cabins. It seemed quite a village. As it came

nearer and nearer, how ever, the aspect changed: the buildings were rotten, the bricks were falling out, the

mills were silent, and the store was closed. Only in the cabins appeared now and then a bit of lazy life. I could

imagine the place under some weird spell, and was halfminded to search out the princess. An old ragged

black man, honest, simple, and improvident, told us the tale. The Wizard of the Norththe Capitalisthad

rushed down in the seventies to woo this coy dark soil. He bought a square mile or more, and for a time the

fieldhands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills buzzed. Then came a change. The agent's son embezzled

the funds and ran off with them. Then the agent himself disappeared. Finally the new agent stole even the

books, and the company in wrath closed its business and its houses, refused to sell, and let houses and

furniture and machinery rust and rot. So the WatersLoring plantation was stilled by the spell of dishonesty,

Somehow that plantation ended our day's journey; for I could not shake off the influence of that silent scene.

Back toward town we glided, past the straight and threadlike pines, past a dark treedotted pond where the

air was heavy with a dead sweet perfume. White slenderlegged curlews flitted by us, and the garnet blooms

of the cotton looked gay against the green and purple stalks. A peasant girl was hoeing in the field,

whiteturbaned and blacklimbed. All this we saw, but the spell still lay upon us.

How curious a land is this,how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human

life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia. Dougherty

County is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called it the Egypt of the Confederacy. It is full of

historic interest. First there is the Swamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows sullenly southward.

The shadow of an old plantation lies at its edge, forlorn and dark. Then comes the pool; pendent gray moss

and brackish waters appear, and forests filled with wildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in

dull red anger; but nobody minds. Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro

convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living green. Spreading trees

spring from a prodigal luxuri ance of undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black

background, until all is one mass of tangled semi tropical foliage, marvellous in its weird savage splendor.

Once we crossed a black silent stream, where the sad trees and writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow and

green, seemed like some vast cathedral,some green Milan builded of wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemed

to see again that fierce tragedy of seventy years ago. Osceola, the Indian Negro chieftain, had risen in the

swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance. His warcry reached the red Creeks of Dougherty, and their warcry

rang from the Chattahoochee to the sea. Men and women and children fled and fell before them as they swept

into Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and hideously painted warrior glided stealthily on,another and

another, until three hundred had crept into the treacherous swamp. Then the false slime closing about them

called the white men from the east. Waistdeep, they fought beneath the tall trees, until the warcry was

Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to

Georgia was heard in these rich swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the

motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint to the Chickasaw hatchee, until

by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew.

A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with

ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty

thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and Old; and men that came there bankrupt

made money and grew rich. In a single decade the cotton output increased fourfold and the value of lands

was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of careless extravagance among the masters.

Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to town; open hospitality and gay entertainment

were the rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich with flower and vine, and in the midst stood the low

And yet with all this there was something sordid, some thing forced,a certain feverish unrest and

recklessness; for was not all this show and tinsel built upon a groan? "This land was a little Hell," said a

ragged, brown, and grave faced man to me. We were seated near a roadside blacksmith shop, and behind

was the bare ruin of some master's home. "I've seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked

aside, and the plough never stopped. Down in the guardhouse, there's where the blood ran."

With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall. The masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and

left only the irresponsible overseers on the land. And the result is such ruin as this, the Lloyd

"homeplace":great waving oaks, a spread of lawn, myrtles and chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a solitary

gatepost standing where once was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and wood

in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion, brown and dingy, filled now with the

grandchildren of the slaves who once waited on its tables; while the family of the master has dwindled to two

lone women, who live in Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we ride on, past

phantom gates and falling homes,past the once flourishing farms of the Smiths, the Gandys, and the

Lagores, and find all dilapidated and half ruined, even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other

days, sits alone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient coach each day.

This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,the rich granary whence potatoes and corn and cotton

poured out to the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861.

Sheltered and secure, it became the place of refuge for families, wealth, and slaves. Yet even then the hard

ruthless rape of the land began to tell. The redclay subsoil already had begun to peer above the loam. The

harder the slaves were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war

and Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction,and now, what is the Egypt of the Confederacy,

It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope and pain. Here sits a pretty blueeyed quadroon

hiding her bare feet; she was married only last week, and yonder in the field is her dark young husband,

hoeing to support her, at thirty cents a day without board. Across the way is Gatesby, brown and tall, lord of

two thousand acres shrewdly won and held. There is a store conducted by his black son, a black smith shop,

and a ginnery. Five miles below here is a town owned and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns

almost a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres and hundreds of black laborers. Their cabins look

better than most, and the farm, with machinery and fertilizers, is much more businesslike than any in the

county, although the man ager drives hard bargains in wages. When now we turn and look five miles above,

there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes,two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the

houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for

rape. And here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison is called; the white

folks say it is ever full of black criminals,the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and

they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced

Immigrants are heirs of the slave baron in Dougherty; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields

and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan.

Here and there are tales of projects for moneygetting, born in the swift days of

Reconstruction,"improvement" companies, wine compa nies, mills and factories; most failed, and

foreigners fell heir. It is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint. The forests are wonderful, the

solemn pines have disappeared, and this is the "Oakey Woods," with its wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks

and palmettos. But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesal ers,

the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the

burden of it all. Here and there a man has raised his head above these murky waters. We passed one fenced

stockfarm with grass and grazing cattle, that looked very homelike after endless corn and cotton. Here and

there are black freeholders: there is the gaunt dullblack Jackson, with his hundred acres. "I says, 'Look up!

If you don't look up you can't get up,'" remarks Jackson, philosophically. And he's gotten up. Dark Carter's

neat barns would do credit to New England. His master helped him to get a start, but when the black man

died last fall the master's sons immediately laid claim to the estate. "And them white folks will get it, too,"

I turn from these welltended acres with a comfortable feeling that the Negro is rising. Even then, however,

the fields, as we proceed, begin to redden and the trees disap pear. Rows of old cabins appear filled with

renters and laborers,cheerless, bare, and dirty, for the most part, al though here and there the very age and

decay makes the scene picturesque. A young black fellow greets us. He is twenty two, and just married.

Until last year he had good luck renting; then cotton fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he had. So he

moved here, where the rent is higher, the land poorer, and the owner inflexible; he rents a fortydollar mule

for twenty dollars a year. Poor lad!a slave at twentytwo. This plantation, owned now by a foreigner, was

a part of the famous Bolton estate. After the war it was for many years worked by gangs of Negro

convicts,and black convicts then were even more plentiful than now; it was a way of making Negroes

work, and the question of guilt was a minor one. Hard tales of cruelty and mistreatment of the chained

freemen are told, but the county authorities were deaf until the freelabor market was nearly ruined by

wholesale migra tion. Then they took the convicts from the plantations, but not until one of the fairest

regions of the "Oakey Woods" had been ruined and ravished into a red waste, out of which only a Yankee or

No wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged, shuffles to our carriage and talks hopelessly. Why

should he strive? Every year finds him deeper in debt. How strange that Georgia, the worldheralded refuge

of poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever England did! The poor land

groans with its birthpains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years

ago it yielded eight times as much. Of his meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in rent, and

most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought on credit. Twenty years yonder sunkencheeked, old

black man has labored under that system, and now, turned day laborer, is supporting his wife and boarding

himself on his wages of a dollar and a half a week, received only part of the year.

The Bolton convict farm formerly included the neighboring plantation. Here it was that the convicts were

lodged in the great log prison still standing. A dismal place it still remains, with rows of ugly huts filled with

surly ignorant tenants. "What rent do you pay here?" I inquired. "I don't know, what is it, Sam?" "All we

make," answered Sam. It is a depressing place,bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association, only a

memory of forced human toil,now, then, and before the war. They are not happy, these black men whom

we meet throughout this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to

associate with the plantation Negro. At best, the natural goodnature is edged with complaint or has changed

into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger. I remember one big

redeyed black whom we met by the roadside. Fortyfive years he had la bored on this farm, beginning

with nothing, and still having nothing. To be sure, he had given four children a common school training, and

perhaps if the new fencelaw had not allowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have raised a little

stock and kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed, and embittered. He stopped us to in

quire after the black boy in Albany, whom it was said a policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the

side walk. And then he said slowly: "Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don't boast this,I don't say

it around loud, or before the children,but I mean it. I've seen them whip my father and my old mother in

Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby oaktrees, was of quite different fibre.

Happy?Well, yes; he laughed and flipped pebbles, and thought the world was as it was. He had worked

here twelve years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they hadn't been to

school this year,couldn't afford books and clothes, and couldn't spare their work. There go part of them to

the fields now,three big boys astride mules, and a strapping girl with bare brown legs. Careless ignorance

and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there;these are the extremes of the Negro problem which

Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out of the ordinary. One came out of a piece of newly

cleared ground, making a wide detour to avoid the snakes. He was an old, hollowcheeked man, with a

drawn and characterful brown face. He had a sort of selfcontained quaintness and rough humor impossible

to describe; a certain cynical earnestness that puzzled one. "The niggers were jealous of me over on the other

place," he said, "and so me and the old woman begged this piece of woods, and I cleared it up myself. Made

nothing for two years, but I reckon I've got a crop now." The cotton looked tall and rich, and we praised it.

He curtsied low, and then bowed almost to the ground, with an imper turbable gravity that seemed almost

suspicious. Then he con tinued, "My mule died last week,"a calamity in this land equal to a devastating

fire in town,"but a white man loaned me another." Then he added, eyeing us, "Oh, I gets along with white

folks." We turned the conversation. "Bears? deer?" he answered, "well, I should say there were," and he let

fly a string of brave oaths, as he told huntingtales of the swamp. We left him standing still in the middle of

The Whistle place, which includes his bit of land, was bought soon after the war by an English syndicate, the

"Dixie Cotton and Corn Company." A marvellous deal of style their factor put on, with his servants and

coachandsix; so much so that the concern soon landed in inextricable bankruptcy. Nobody lives in the old

house now, but a man comes each winter out of the North and collects his high rents. I know not which are

the more touching,such old empty houses, or the homes of the masters' sons. Sad and bitter tales lie hidden

back of those white doors,tales of poverty, of struggle, of disappointment. A revolution such as that of '63

is a terrible thing; they that rose rich in the morning often slept in pau pers' beds. Beggars and vulgar

speculators rose to rule over them, and their children went astray. See yonder sadcolored house, with its

cabins and fences and glad crops! It is not glad within; last month the prodigal son of the struggling father

wrote home from the city for money. Money! Where was it to come from? And so the son rose in the night

and killed his baby, and killed his wife, and shot himself dead. And the world passed on.

I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a graceful bit of forest and a singing brook. A long

low house faced us, with porch and flying pillars, great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in the evening

sun. But the window panes were gone, the pillars were wormeaten, and the moss grown roof was falling

in. Half curiously I peered through the unhinged door, and saw where, on the wall across the hall, was written

Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty County is the northwest. Soberly timbered in oak and

pine, it has none of that halftropical luxuriance of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer signs of a

romantic past, and more of systematic modern landgrabbing and moneygetting. White people are more in

evidence here, and farmer and hired labor replace to some extent the absentee landlord and rackrented

tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and

there were fences and meadows here and there. Most of this land was poor, and beneath the notice of the

slavebaron, before the war. Since then his poor relations and foreign immigrants have seized it. The returns

of the farmer are too small to allow much for wages, and yet he will not sell off small farms. There is the

Negro Sanford; he has worked fourteen years as overseer on the Ladson place, and "paid out enough for

fertilizers to have bought a farm," but the owner will not sell off a few acres.

Two childrena boy and a girlare hoeing sturdily in the fields on the farm where Corliss works. He is

smoothfaced and brown, and is fencing up his pigs. He used to run a successful cottongin, but the Cotton

Seed Oil Trust has forced the price of ginning so low that he says it hardly pays him. He points out a stately

old house over the way as the home of "Pa Willis." We eagerly ride over, for "Pa Willis" was the tall and

powerful black Moses who led the Negroes for a generation, and led them well. He was a Baptist preacher,

and when he died, two thousand black people followed him to the grave; and now they preach his funeral

sermon each year. His widow lives here,a weazened, sharpfeatured little woman, who curtsied quaintly as

we greeted her. Fur ther on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous Negro farmer in the county. It is a joy to

meet him,a great broadshoul dered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial. Six hun dred and fifty

acres he owns, and has eleven black tenants. A neat and tidy home nestled in a flowergarden, and a little

We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is renting and struggling; and the eleven hundred

acres of the Sennet plantation, with its Negro overseer. Then the character of the farms begins to change.

Nearly all the lands belong to Russian Jews; the overseers are white, and the cabins are bare boardhouses

scattered here and there. The rents are high, and daylaborers and "contract" hands abound. It is a keen, hard

struggle for living here, and few have time to talk. Tired with the long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville.

It is a silent cluster of farmhouses standing on the crossroads, with one of its stores closed and the other kept

by a Negro preacher. They tell great tales of busy times at Gillonsville before all the railroads came to

Albany; now it is chiefly a memory. Riding down the street, we stop at the preacher's and seat ourselves

before the door. It was one of those scenes one cannot soon forget:a wide, low, little house, whose

motherly roof reached over and sheltered a snug little porch. There we sat, after the long hot drive, drinking

cool water,the talkative little store keeper who is my daily companion; the silent old black woman

patching pantaloons and saying never a word; the ragged picture of helpless misfortune who called in just to

see the preacher; and finally the neat matronly preacher's wife, plump, yellow, and intelligent. "Own land?"

said the wife; "well, only this house." Then she added quietly. "We did buy seven hundred acres across up

yonder, and paid for it; but they cheated us out of it. Sells was the owner." "Sells!" echoed the ragged

misfortune, who was leaning against the balustrade and listening, "he's a regular cheat. I worked for him

thirtyseven days this spring, and he paid me in card board checks which were to be cashed at the end of the

month. But he never cashed them,kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn

and furni ture" "Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure by law." "Well, he took it just the same,"

Cynic favors I will strew; I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;

I will take the joys they know; They shall hunger after vanities and still anhungered go. Madness shall be on

the people, ghastly jealousies arise; Brother's blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.

Have you ever seen a cottonfield white with harvest,its golden fleece hovering above the black earth like

a silvery cloud edged with dark green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from Carolina to

Texas across that Black and human Sea? I have sometimes half suspected that here the winged ram

Chrysomallus left that Fleece after which Jason and his Argonauts went vaguely wandering into the shadowy

East three thousand years ago; and certainly one might frame a pretty and not farfetched analogy of

witchery and dragons' teeth, and blood and armed men, between the ancient and the modern quest of the

And now the golden fleece is found; not only found, but, in its birthplace, woven. For the hum of the

cottonmills is the newest and most significant thing in the New South today. All through the Carolinas and

Georgia, away down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red buildings, bare and homely, and yet so busy and noisy

withal that they scarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land. Perhaps they sprang from drag ons' teeth.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once defied

the parvenu have crept one by one across the seas, and then slowly and reluctantly, but surely, have started

To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly and tell us that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom

has moved from the Black to the White Belt,that the Negro of today raises not more than half of the

cotton crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled, and more than doubled, since the era of

slavery, and that, even granting their con tention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger than

that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes. So the Negro forms today one of the chief figures in a

great worldindustry; and this, for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes the fieldhands of

We seldom study the condition of the Negro today hon estly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume

that we know it all. Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have

them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really know of these millions,of their daily lives and

longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All

this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions

separate in time and space, and differing widely in training and culture. Today, then, my reader, let us turn

our faces to the Black Belt of Georgia and seek simply to know the condition of the black farmlaborers of

Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The country is rich, yet the people are

poor. The keynote of the Black Belt is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued

inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income cover expense. This is the direct heritage

of the South from the wasteful econo mies of the slave regime; but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis

by the Emancipation of the slaves. In 1860, Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two

and a half millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at three millions,making five and a half millions of

property, the value of which depended largely on the slave system, and on the speculative demand for land

once marvellously rich but already partially devitalized by careless and exhaustive cul ture. The war then

meant a financial crash; in place of the five and a half millions of 1860, there remained in 1870 only farms

valued at less than two millions. With this came in creased competition in cotton culture from the rich lands

of Texas; a steady fall in the normal price of cotton followed, from about fourteen cents a pound in 1860 until

it reached four cents in 1898. Such a financial revolution was it that involved the owners of the cottonbelt in

The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were not as imposing and aristocratic as those of

Virginia. The Big House was smaller and usually onestoried, and sat very near the slave cabins. Sometimes

these cabins stretched off on either side like wings; sometimes only on one side, forming a double row, or

edging the road that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare. The form and disposition of the

laborers' cabins throughout the Black Belt is today the same as in slavery days. Some live in the selfsame

cabins, others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are sprinkled in little groups over the face of the

land, centering about some dilapidated Big House where the headtenant or agent lives. The general

character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the whole unaltered. There were in the county,

outside the corporate town of Albany, about fifteen hundred Negro families in 1898. Out of all these, only a

single family occupied a house with seven rooms; only fourteen have five rooms or more. The mass live in

The size and arrangements of a people's homes are no unfair index of their condition. If, then, we inquire

more carefully into these Negro homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the land is

the oneroom cabin,now standing in the shadow of the Big House, now staring at the dusty road, now

rising dark and sombre amid the green of the cottonfields. It is nearly always old and bare, built of rough

boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled. Light and ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the

square hole in the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or ornamentation without. Within is

a fireplace, black and smoky, and usually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and a few

chairs compose the furniture; while a stray showbill or a newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls.

Now and then one may find such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming fireplaces and

hospitable door; but the majority are dirty and dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly venti

Above all, the cabins are crowded. We have come to associ ate crowding with homes in cities almost

exclusively. This is primarily because we have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in

Dougherty County one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two rooms, and for every ten

rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes there are twentyfive persons. The worst tenement

abominations of New York do not have above twentytwo persons for every ten rooms. Of course, one small,

close room in a city, without a yard, is in many respects worse than the larger single country room. In other

respects it is better; it has glass windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy floor. The single great

advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may spend most of his life outside his hovel, in the open fields.

There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long custom born of slavery has assigned such

homes to Negroes; white laborers would be offered better accommoda tions, and might, for that and similar

reasons, give better work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to such accommodations, do not as a rule demand

better; they do not know what better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords as a class have not yet come to

realize that it is a good business investment to raise the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious

methods; that a Negro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give more efficient work

and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents.

Lastly, among such conditions of life there are few incentives to make the laborer become a better farmer. If

he is ambitious, he moves to town or tries other labor; as a tenantfarmer his outlook is almost hopeless, and

following it as a makeshift, he takes the house that is given him without protest.

In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. The fami lies are both small and large; there are many single

tenants, widows and bachelors, and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and the size of the

houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups: the grown children go away as contract hands or

migrate to town, the sister goes into service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies, and many

newly married couples, but comparatively few families with halfgrown and grown sons and daughters. The

average size of Negro families has undoubtedly decreased since the war, primarily from economic stress. In

Russia over a third of the bridegrooms and over half the brides are under twenty; the same was true of the

antebellum Negroes. To day, however, very few of the boys and less than a fifth of the Negro girls under

twenty are married. The young men marry between the ages of twentyfive and thirtyfive; the young

women between twenty and thirty. Such postponement is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and

support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in the country districts, to sexual immorality. The form of this

immorality, however, is very seldom that of prostitution, and less fre quently that of illegitimacy than one

would imagine. Rather, it takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group has been formed.

The number of separated persons is thirtyfive to the thousand,a very large number. It would of course be

unfair to compare this number with divorce statistics, for many of these separated women are in reality

widowed, were the truth known, and in other cases the separation is not permanent. Nevertheless, here lies

the seat of greatest moral danger. There is little or no prostitution among these Negroes, and over

threefourths of the families, as found by housetohouse investigation, deserve to be classed as decent

people with considerable regard for female chastity. To be sure, the ideas of the mass would not suit New

England, and there are many loose habits and notions. Yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than

in Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague spot in sexual relations is easy

marriage and easy separation. This is no sudden development, nor the fruit of Emancipa tion. It is the plain

heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, with his master's consent, "took up" with Mary. No cere mony

was necessary, and in the busy life of the great planta tions of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed with.

If now the master needed Sam's work in another plantation or in another part of the same plantation, or if he

took a notion to sell the slave, Sam's married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken, and then it

was clearly to the mas ter's interest to have both of them take new mates. This widespread custom of two

centuries has not been eradicated in thirty years. Today Sam's grandson "takes up" with a woman without

license or ceremony; they live together de cently and honestly, and are, to all intents and purposes, man and

wife. Sometimes these unions are never broken until death; but in too many cases family quarrels, a roving

spirit, a rival suitor, or perhaps more frequently the hopeless battle to support a family, lead to separation, and

a broken house hold is the result. The Negro church has done much to stop this practice, and now most

marriage ceremonies are per formed by the pastors. Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated, and only a

Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to characterize it as poor and ignorant.

Perhaps ten per cent compose the welltodo and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent are

thoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are poor and ignorant, fairly honest and well

meaning, plodding, and to a degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness. Such class lines are by

no means fixed; they vary, one might almost say, with the price of cotton. The degree of ignorance cannot

easily be expressed. We may say, for instance, that nearly twothirds of them cannot read or write. This but

partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of

the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities,of nearly all those things which slavery in

selfdefence had to keep them from learning. Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social

atmosphere forms the puzzling problems of the black boy's mature years. America is not another word for

It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a

mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant it may

be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils

and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its

life,all this, even as you and I. These black thousands are not in reality lazy; they are improvident and

careless; they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the great townworld on Saturday;

they have their loafers and their rascals; but the great mass of them work continuously and faithfully for a

return, and under circum stances that would call forth equal voluntary effort from few if any other modern

laboring class. Over eightyeight per cent of themmen, women, and childrenare farmers. Indeed, this is

almost the only industry. Most of the children get their schooling after the "crops are laid by," and very few

there are that stay in school after the spring work has begun. Childlabor is to be found here in some of its

worst phases, as fostering ignorance and stunting physical development. With the grown men of the county

there is little variety in work: thirteen hundred are farmers, and two hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc.,

including twentyfour artisans, ten merchants, twentyone preachers, and four teachers. This narrowness of

life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen hundred and fifty of these are farm laborers, one

hundred are servants and washerwomen, leaving sixtyfive housewives, eight teach ers, and six

Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in the United States over half the youth and

adults are not in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learn ing of the world, or resting after

the heat of the strife. But here ninetysix per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and

cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of

careless happy childhood and dreaming youth. The dull mo notony of daily toil is broken only by the gayety

of the thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town. The toil, like all farm toil, is monotonous, and here there are

little machinery and few tools to relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in the pure

The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine or ten months in succession the crops will

come if asked: garden vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in August, sweet

potatoes in September, and cotton from then to Christmas. And yet on twothirds of the land there is but one

Away down the Baysan road, where the broad flat fields are flanked by great oak forests, is a plantation;

many thou sands of acres it used to run, here and there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen hundred

human beings here obeyed the call of one,were his in body, and largely in soul. One of them lives there

yet,a short, stocky man, his dullbrown face seamed and drawn, and his tightly curled hair gray white.

The crops? Just tolerable, he said; just tolerable. Get ting on? Nohe wasn't getting on at all. Smith of

Albany "furnishes" him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds of cotton. Can't make anything at that. Why

didn't he buy land! Humph! Takes money to buy land. And he turns away. Free! The most piteous thing amid

all the black ruin of wartime, amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers and

maidens, and the fall of an empire,the most piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman who threw

down his hoe because the world called him free. What did such a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of

money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,not even owner ship of the rags on his back. Free!

On Saturday, once or twice a month, the old master, before the war, used to dole out bacon and meal to his

Negroes. And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his true helplessness dawned on the freedman, he

came back and picked up his hoe, and old master still doled out his bacon and meal. The legal form of service

was theoretically far different; in practice, taskwork or "cropping" was substituted for daily toil in gangs;

and the slave gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with indeterminate

Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted their plantations, and the reign of the

merchant began. The merchant of the Black Belt is a curious institution,part banker, part landlord, part

banker, and part despot. His store, which used most frequently to stand at the crossroads and be come the

centre of a weekly village, has now moved to town; and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The merchant

keeps everything,clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork and meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and

ploughs, seed and fertilizer,and what he has not in stock he can give you an order for at the store across the

way. Here, then, comes the ten ant, Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent land lord's agent

for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervously until the merchant finishes his morning chat with

Colonel Saunders, and calls out, "Well, Sam, what do you want?" Sam wants him to "furnish" him,i.e., to

advance him food and clothing for the year, and perhaps seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If

Sam seems a favorable subject, he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes a chattel mortgage on

his mule and wagon in return for seed and a week's rations. As soon as the green cottonleaves appear above

the ground, another mortgage is given on the "crop." Every Saturday, or at longer intervals, Sam calls upon

the merchant for his "rations"; a family of five usually gets about thirty pounds of fat sidepork and a couple

of bushels of cornmeal a month. Besides this, clothing and shoes must be furnished; if Sam or his family is

sick, there are orders on the druggist and doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the black smith, etc.

If Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well, he is often encouraged to buy more,sugar, extra clothes,

perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom encouraged to save. When cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd

merchants of Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season, mostly to black men.

The security offered for such transactionsa crop and chattel mortgagemay at first seem slight. And,

indeed, the merchants tell many a true tale of shiftlessness and cheating; of cotton picked at night, mules

disappearing, and tenants absconding. But on the whole the merchant of the Black Belt is the most

prosperous man in the section. So skilfully and so closely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the tenant,

that the black man has often simply to choose between pau perism and crime; he "waives" all homestead

exemptions in his contract; he cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which the laws put almost in the full

control of the landowner and of the merchant. When the crop is growing the merchant watches it like a

hawk; as soon as it is ready for market he takes possession of it, sells it, pays the landowner his rent, subtracts

his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimes happens, there is anything left, he hands it over to the black serf for

The direct result of this system is an allcotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the

tenant. The currency of the Black Belt is cotton. It is a crop always salable for ready money, not usually

subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which the Negroes know how to raise. The landlord

therefore demands his rent in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop. There is no

use asking the black tenant, then, to diversify his crops,he cannot under this system. Moreover, the system

is bound to bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting a little onemule wagon on the River road. A

young black fellow sat in it driving listlessly, his elbows on his knees. His darkfaced wife sat beside him,

"Hello!" cried my driver,he has a most imprudent way of addressing these people, though they seem used

"Meat and meal," answered the man, stopping. The meat lay uncovered in the bottom of the wagon,a great

"Two dollars." One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town. Here was a man paying five dollars for

goods which he could have bought for three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar and a half.

Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started behind,started in debt. This was not his choosing,

but the crime of this happygolucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies,

its Spanish war inter ludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is

In the year of lowpriced cotton, 1898, out of three hun dred tenant families one hundred and seventyfive

ended their year's work in debt to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and the

remaining seventyfive made a total profit of sixteen hundred dollars. The net indebtedness of the black

tenant families of the whole county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars. In a more prosperous year

the situation is far better; but on the average the majority of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which

means that they work for board and clothes. Such an economic organiza tion is radically wrong. Whose is

The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but discernible. And one of the chief, outside the

carelessness of the nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread opinion among the

merchants and employers of the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work.

Without doubt, some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the freelabor system to keep the listless and

lazy at work; and even today the mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern

labor ers. Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of the ignorant laborers have

a good chance to take refuge. And to all this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a

system of unrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black laborers. Nor is this

peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all

grounddown peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of the Negroes in the Black Belt today; and they

are thinking about it. Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the inevitable results of this pondering.

I see now that ragged black man sitting on a log, aimlessly whittling a stick. He muttered to me with the

murmur of many ages, when he said: "White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and night and make

crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man sittin' down gits all. It's wrong." And what do the better

classes of Negroes do to improve their situation? One of two things: if any way possible, they buy land; if

not, they migrate to town. Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for the serf to escape into the freedom of

townlife, even so today there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers. In considerable parts of all

the Gulf States, and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on the plantations in the

backcountry districts are still held at forced labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in

districts where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor whites, and the Negroes are

beyond the reach of schools and intercourse with their advancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, the

sheriff, elected by white suf frage, can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return him, and ask no

questions. If he escape to another county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon to

secure his return. Even if some unduly officious person insist upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably

make his con viction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be bought by the master. Such a

system is impossible in the more civilized parts of the South, or near the large towns and cities; but in those

vast stretches of land beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment is sadly

broken. This represents the lowest economic depths of the black American peasant; and in a study of the rise

and condition of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic progress from the modern serfdom.

Even in the betterordered country districts of the South the free movement of agricultural laborers is

hindered by the migrationagent laws. The "Associated Press" recently in formed the world of the arrest of

a young white man in Southern Georgia who represented the "Atlantic Naval Sup plies Company," and who

"was caught in the act of enticing hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer." The crime for which

this young man was arrested is taxed five hundred dollars for each county in which the employment agent

proposes to gather laborers for work outside the State. Thus the Negroes' ignorance of the labormarket

outside his own vicinity is increased rather than diminished by the laws of nearly every Southern State.

Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back districts and small towns of the South, that the

character of all Negroes unknown to the mass of the community must be vouched for by some white man.

This is really a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose protection the newmade freedman

was put. In many instances this system has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the

protection and guidance of the former master's family, or other white friends, the freedman progressed in

wealth and morality. But the same system has in other cases resulted in the refusal of whole communities to

recognize the right of a Negro to change his habitation and to be master of his own fortunes. A black stranger

in Baker County, Georgia, for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway and made to

state his business to the satisfaction of any white interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems

Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the

migra tion of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over large areas. Besides this, the chance for

lawless oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater in the country than in the city, and nearly all the

more serious race disturbances of the last decade have arisen from disputes in the count be tween master and

man,as, for instance, the Sam Hose affair. As a result of such a situation, there arose, first, the Black Belt;

and, second, the Migration to Town. The Black Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of

labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling for selfprotection,a massing of

the black popu lation for mutual defence in order to secure the peace and tranquillity necessary to economic

advance. This movement took place between Emancipation and 1880, and only par tially accomplished the

desired results. The rush to town since 1880 is the countermovement of men disappointed in the economic

In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this experiment in huddling for protection.

Only ten per cent of the adult population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the whites

four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers,a personal freedom

from arbitrary treatment, which makes hun dreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages and

economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural laborers are

drifting to town and leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes become

landowners, and build up the black landed peasantry, which has for a generation and more been the dream

To the carwindow sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few

leisure hours of a holiday trip to unravelling the snarl of centuries,to such men very often the whole

trouble with the black field hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia's word, "Shift less!" They have

noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw last summer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of

a long hot day. A couple of young black fellows passed us in a muleteam, with several bushels of loose corn

in the ear. One was driving, listlessly bent forward, his elbows on his knees,a happygolucky, careless

picture of irrespon sibility. The other was fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon. As we passed we noticed

an ear of corn fall from the wagon. They never saw it,not they. A rod farther on we noted another ear on

the ground; and between that creeping mule and town we counted twentysix ears of corn. Shiftless? Yes, the

personification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those boys: they are not lazy; tomorrow morning they'll be

up with the sun; they work hard when they do work, and they work willingly. They have no sordid, selfish,

moneygetting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash. They'll loaf before your face and work behind

your back with goodnatured honesty. They'll steal a watermelon, and hand you back your lost purse intact.

Their great defect as laborers lies in their lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exer tion.

They are careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful; they are improvident because the

im provident ones of their acquaintance get on about as well as the provident. Above all, they cannot see

why they should take unusual pains to make the white man's land better, or to fatten his mule, or save his

corn. On the other hand, the white landowner argues that any attempt to improve these laborers by increased

responsibility, or higher wages, or better homes, or land of their own, would be sure to result in failure. He

shows his Northern visitor the scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, the wornout soil and

Now it happens that both master and man have just enough argument on their respective sides to make it

difficult for them to understand each other. The Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills and

misfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the white man seizes the fruit of his toil; if he is ignorant, it is because

the white man gives him neither time nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any misfortune happens to him, it

is because of some hidden machinations of "white folks." On the other hand, the masters and the masters'

sons have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling down to he daylaborers for bread and

clothes, are infected with a silly desire to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied, and careless,

where their fathers were happy and dumb and faithful. "Why, you niggers have an easier time than I do," said

a puzzled Albany merchant to his black customer. "Yes," he replied, "and so does yo' hogs."

Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless fieldhand as a startingpoint, let us inquire how the black

thousands of Dougherty have struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that ideal is. All social

struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then of social classes, among a homo geneous

population. Today the following economic classes are plainly differentiated among these Negroes.

A "submerged tenth" of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent who are metayers and thirtynine per

cent of semimetayers and wagelaborers. There are left five per cent of moneyrenters and six per cent of

freeholders,the "Up per Ten" of the land. The croppers are entirely without capital, even in the limited

sense of food or money to keep them from seedtime to harvest. All they furnish is their labor; the

landowner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and house; and at the end of the year the laborer gets from a

third to a half of the crop. Out of his share, however, comes pay and interest for food and clothing advanced

him during the year. Thus we have a laborer without capital and without wages, and an employer whose

capital is largely his employ ees' wages. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for hirer and hired, and is

Above the croppers come the great mass of the black population who work the land on their own

responsibility, paying rent in cotton and supported by the cropmortgage system. After the war this system

was attractive to the freedmen on account of its larger freedom and its possibility for making a surplus. But

with the carrying out of the croplien system, the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of debt, the

position of the metayers has sunk to a dead level of practi cally unrewarded toil. Formerly all tenants had

some capital, and often considerable; but absentee landlordism, rising rack rent, and failing cotton have

stripped them wellnigh of all, and probably not over half of them today own their mules. The change from

cropper to tenant was accomplished by fixing the rent. If, now, the rent fixed was reasonable, this was an

incentive to the tenant to strive. On the other hand, if the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the

result was to discourage and check the efforts of the black peas antry. There is no doubt that the latter case

is true; that in Dougherty County every economic advantage of the price of cotton in market and of the

strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage of by the landlords and merchants, and swallowed up in rent

and interest. If cotton rose in price, the rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the rent remained or followed

reluctantly. If the tenant worked hard and raised a large crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year the

crop failed, his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for debt. There were, of course, exceptions to

this,cases of personal kindness and forbearance; but in the vast majority of cases the rule was to extract the

The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent of his crop in rent. The result of such rackrent can

only be evil,abuse and neglect of the soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers, and a widespread

sense of injustice. "Wherever the country is poor," cried Arthur Young, "it is in the hands of metayers," and

"their condition is more wretched than that of daylaborers." He was talking of Italy a century ago; but he

might have been talking of Dougherty County today. And especially is that true today which he declares

was true in France before the Revolution: "The metayers are considered as little better than menial servants,

removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to the will of the landlords." On this low plane

half the black population of Dougherty Countyperhaps more than half the black millions of this landare

A degree above these we may place those laborers who receive money wages for their work. Some receive a

house with perhaps a gardenspot; then supplies of food and cloth ing are advanced, and certain fixed

wages are given at the end of the year, varying from thirty to sixty dollars, out of which the supplies must be

paid for, with interest. About eighteen per cent of the population belong to this class of semimetayers, while

twentytwo per cent are laborers paid by the month or year, and are either "furnished" by their own savings

or perhaps more usually by some merchant who takes his chances of payment. Such laborers receive from

thirtyfive to fifty cents a day during the working season. They are usually young unmarried persons, some

being women; and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or, more seldom, become renters.

The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging classes, and form five per cent of the

families. The sole advantage of this small class is their freedom to choose their crops, and the increased

responsibility which comes through having money transactions. While some of the rent ers differ little in

condition from the metayers, yet on the whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and are the

ones who eventually become landowners. Their bet ter character and greater shrewdness enable them to

gain, perhaps to demand, better terms in rents; rented farms, vary ing from forty to a hundred acres, bear an

average rental of about fiftyfour dollars a year. The men who conduct such farms do not long remain

renters; either they sink to meta yers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to be landowners.

In 1870 the taxbooks of Dougherty report no Negroes as landholders. If there were any such at that

time,and there may have been a few,their land was probably held in the name of some white patron,a

method not uncommon during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had begun with seven hundred and fifty

acres; ten years later this had in creased to over sixtyfive hundred acres, to nine thousand acres in 1890 and

ten thousand in 1900. The total assessed property has in this same period risen from eighty thousand dollars

Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in some respects difficult to be sure of the real

tendencies; they are the panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the system of

assessing property in the country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical

value; there are no assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a taxreceiver. Thus public opinion

plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from year to year. Certainly these figures show the small

amount of accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the conse quent large dependence of their property

on temporary pros perity. They have little to tide over a few years of economic depression, and are at the

mercy of the cottonmarket far more than the whites. And thus the landowners, despite their marvellous

efforts, are really a transient class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class of renters

or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses. Of one hundred landowners in 1898, half had

bought their land since 1893, a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and the rest

between 1870 and 1884. In all, one hundred and eightyfive Negroes have owned land in this county since

If all the black landowners who had ever held land here had kept it or left it in the hands of black men, the

Negroes would have owned nearer thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet

these fifteen thou sand acres are a creditable showing,a proof of no little weight of the worth and ability

of the Negro people. If they had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had been in an

enlightened and rich community which really desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a

result small or even insignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorant fieldhands, in the face of poverty, a

falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has

meant a tremendous effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle,

a hard and soulsickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.

Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black Belt, only six per cent of the population have

suc ceeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow and shrink

in number with the wavering of the cottonmarket. Fully ninetyfour per cent have struggled for land and

failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of escape toward which

they have turned in increasing numbers, namely, mi gration to town. A glance at the distribution of land

among the black owners curiously reveals this fact. In 1898 the holdings were as follows: Under forty acres,

fortynine fami lies; forty to two hundred and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred and fifty to one

thousand acres, thirteen fami lies; one thousand or more acres, two families. Now in 1890 there were

fortyfour holdings, but only nine of these were under forty acres. The great increase of holdings, then, has

come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where their owners really share in the town life; this is a

part of the rush to town. And for every landowner who has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard

conditions of country life, how many fieldhands, how many tenants, how many ruined renters, have joined

that long procession? Is it not strange compensation? The sin of the country districts is visited on the town,

and the social sores of city life today may, here in Dougherty County, and perhaps in many places near and

The worldold phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to have new exemplification during the

new century. Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world's

undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a

chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and

debauchery,this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the

isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether satisfy the conscience of the modern

world to be told compla cently that all this has been right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over

weakness, of righteousness over evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would certainly be sooth ing if one could

readily believe all this; and yet there are too many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily explained away.

We feel and know that there are many delicate differ ences in race psychology, numberless changes that our

crude social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, which explain much of history and social

development. At the same time, too, we know that these considerations have never adequately explained or

It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races

the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able

to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a

premium on greed and impudence and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled daily to turn

more and more to a conscientious study of the phenomena of racecontact,to a study frank and fair, and

not falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we have in the South as fine a field for such a study

as the world affords,a field, to be sure, which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath his

dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all about, but nevertheless a line of study

which by reason of the enormous race complications with which God seems about to punish this nation must

increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought, we must ask, what are the actual relations of

whites and blacks in the South? and we must be answered, not by apology or faultfinding, but by a plain,

In the civilized life of today the contact of men and their relations to each other fall in a few main lines of

action and communication: there is, first, the physical proximity of home and dwellingplaces, the way in

which neighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly, and in our age

chiefest, there are the economic relations, the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning a living,

for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the production of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the

cooperation in social control, in group government, in laying and paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth

place there are the less tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and commerce, the

interchange of ideas through conversation and conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all,

the gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quid which we call public opinion. Closely

allied with this come the various forms of social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theatres, in house

gatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage. Finally, there are the varying forms of religious enterprise, of

moral teaching and benevolent en deavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in the same

communities are brought into contact with each other. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate, from my

point of view, how the black race in the South meet and mingle with the whites in these matters of everyday

First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw in nearly every Southern community a physical

colorline on the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The winding and

intricacy of the geographical colorline varies, of course, in different communities. I know some towns

where a straight line drawn through the middle of the main street separates ninetenths of the whites from

nine tenths of the blacks. In other towns the older settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band

of blacks; in still other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung up amid surrounding whites.

Usually in cities each street has its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close

proximity. Even in the country something of this segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all

communi ties. A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quite

common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One thing, however, seldom

occurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity.

It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst

of each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the close contact of master

and house servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and

sympathy, while at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the fieldhands was removed from

the sight and hearing of the family. One can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father's

parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new

picture. On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white people do not

have the black man's best interests at heart has been intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of

Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground made familiar by study, much

discussion, and no little philanthropic effort. And yet with all this there are many essential elements in the

cooperation of Negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too readily overlooked or not thoroughly

understood. The average American can easily con ceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with

black laborers. To him the Southern problem is simply that of making efficient workingmen out of this

material, by giving them the requisite technical skill and the help of invested capital. The problem, however,

is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that these workingmen have been trained for centuries

as slaves. They exhibit, therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training; they are willing and

goodnatured, but not selfreliant, provident, or careful. If now the economic development of the South is to

be pushed to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of workingmen thrown into

relentless competition with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to

that of the modern selfreliant democratic laborer. What the black laborer needs is careful personal guidance,

group leadership of men with hearts in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty. Nor

does it require any finespun theories of racial differences to prove the necessity of such group training after

the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous education in

submission, care lessness, and stealing. After Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume

this group leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquire whose duty it

waswhether that of the white exmaster who had profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist

whose persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose edict freed the bondmen; I will

not stop to ask whose duty it was, but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were

not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without skill, without economic organi zation,

without even the bald protection of law, order, and decency,left in a great land, not to settle down to slow

and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown al most immediately into relentless and sharp

competition with the best of modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant is

fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor.

For we must never forget that the economic system of the South today which has succeeded the old regime

is not the same system as that of the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their tradeunions,

their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather,

a copy of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts,the En gland that wrung

pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern

gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has never returned to them. Rather it has

passed to those men who have come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New South,the sons

of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous

immigrants. Into the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen; and this to their

sorrow. For the laborers as such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither

sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is bound

to suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelli gent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain

themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The results among them, even, are long hours

of toil, low wages, child labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the black

laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best

element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before,

by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the

freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom

Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or oversight, he has been made in law and custom

the victim of the worst and most unscrupulous men in each community. The croplien system which is

depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also

the result of cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by

conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest

a crime. I have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay for a farm in

installments three separate times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterpris ing American who

sold it to him pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty

cents a day. I have seen a black farmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm

and strip it of every single marketable article,mules, ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding,

clocks, lookingglass, and all this without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead

exemptions, and without rendering to a single responsible person any account or reckoning. And such

proceedings can happen, and will happen, in any community where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by

custom and raceprejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race brotherhood. So long as the best elements

of a community do not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for the weaker members of their

This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all advance in the black South, or the

absence of a class of black landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are accumulating

property and making good citizens. But it does mean that this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic

system might easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to accomplish

much less than they deserve to, and that, above all, the personnel of the successful class is left to chance and

accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable methods of selection. As a remedy for this, there is

but one possible procedure. We must accept some of the race preju dice in the South as a fact,deplorable

in its intensity, unfortunate in results, and dangerous for the future, but nev ertheless a hard fact which only

time can efface. We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the

whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and selfsacrificing leadership of the blacks which

their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leader ship, such social teaching and example, must

come from the blacks themselves. For some time men doubted as to whether the Negro could develop such

leaders; but today no one seriously disputes the capability of individual Negroes to assimilate the culture

and common sense of modern civiliza tion, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to their fellows. If this

is true, then here is the path out of the economic situation, and here is the imperative demand for trained

Negro leaders of character and intelligence,men of skill, men of light and leading, collegebred men, black

captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern

civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by force of precept and

example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of common blood and ideals. But if such men are to be effective

they must have some power,they must be backed by the best public opinion of these communities, and

able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as the experience of the world has taught are

Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world is the power of the ballot; and this brings me to a

consideration of the third form of contact between whites and blacks in the South,political activity.

In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be traced with unusual accuracy the

prevalent conceptions of government. In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution

to believe pretty thoroughly in universal suffrage. We argued, as we thought then rather logically, that no

social class was so good, so true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny of its

neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected;

consequently that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,with the right to have a voice in the policy

of the state,that the greatest good to the greatest number could be attained. To be sure, there were

objections to these arguments, but we thought we had answered them tersely and convincingly; if some one

complained of the ignorance of voters, we answered, "Edu cate them." If another complained of their

venality, we replied, "Disfranchise them or put them in jail." And, fi nally, to the men who feared

demagogues and the natural perversity of some human beings we insisted that time and bitter experience

would teach the most hardheaded. It was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in the South was

raised. Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free. How were they to be protected from those who

did not believe in their freedom and were determined to thwart it? Not by force, said the North; not by

government guardian ship, said the South; then by the ballot, the sole and legiti mate defence of a free

people, said the Common Sense of the Nation. No one thought, at the time, that the exslaves could use the

ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did think that the possession of so great power by a great class

in the nation would compel their fellows to educate this class to its intelligent use.

Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of moral retrogression and political trickery

that ever follows in the wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men

began to leave poli tics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride

themselves on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded

public office as a private perquisite. In this state of mind it became easy to wink at the suppression of the

Negro vote in the South, and to advise selfrespecting Negroes to leave politics entirely alone. The decent

and reputable citi zens of the North who neglected their own civic duties grew hilarious over the

exaggerated importance with which the Negro regarded the franchise. Thus it easily happened that more and

more the better class of Negroes followed the advice from abroad and the pressure from home, and took no

further interest in politics, leaving to the careless and the venal of their race the exercise of their rights as

voters. The black vote that still remained was not trained and educated, but further debauched by open and

unblushing bribery, or force and fraud; until the Negro voter was thoroughly inocu lated with the idea that

And finally, now, today, when we are awakening to the fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on

this conti nent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the raising of voting

to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children's

children,in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we going to say to the

black voter of the South? Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of

human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government,

and to give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not saying a word against all

legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the

present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and frankly

declared in nearly every case that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man

Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main question of the industrial and intellectual

development of the Negro? Can we establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the

South who, by law and public opinion, have absolutely no voice in shaping the laws under which they live

and work? Can the modern organization of industry, assuming as it does free democratic government and the

power and ability of the laboring classes to compel re spect for their welfare,can this system be carried

out in the South when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and powerless in its own

defence? Today the black man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or

how those taxes shall be expended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to who shall

make the laws, and how they shall be made. It is pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to

get lawmakers in some States even to listen to the respectful presentation of the black man's side of a

current controversy. Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting

safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest

in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with cour

tesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused lawbreaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men

I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and shortcomings of the Negro people; I should be the

last to withhold sympathy from the white South in its efforts to solve its intricate social problems. I freely

acknowledged that it is possible, and sometimes best, that a partially undeveloped people should be ruled by

the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start and fight

the world's battles alone. I have already pointed out how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual

guidance the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit that if the representatives of the best

white Southern public opinion were the ruling and guiding powers in the South today the conditions

indicated would be fairly well fulfilled. But the point I have insisted upon and now emphasize again, is that

the best opinion of the South today is not the ruling opinion. That to leave the Negro helpless and without a

ballot today is to leave him not to the guidance of the best, but rather to the exploitation and debauchment of

the worst; that this is no truer of the South than of the North,of the North than of Europe: in any land, in

any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white,

black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation

Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is closely connected with the question of Negro

crime. There can be no doubt that crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty years, and

that there has appeared in the slums of great cities a distinct criminal class among the blacks. In explaining

this unfortunate development, we must note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of Emancipation was to

increase crime and criminals, and (2) that the police system of the South was primarily designed to control

slaves. As to the first point, we must not forget that under a strict slave system there can scarcely be such a

thing as crime. But when these variously constituted human particles are sud denly thrown broadcast on the

sea of life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or down by the chance currents

of a busy hurrying world. So great an economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63 meant a

weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social

grades. Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather

stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the

Negro criminal was a phenome non to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should not occasion

Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on careful and delicate dealing with these criminals.

Their of fences at first were those of laziness, carelessness, and im pulse, rather than of malignity or

ungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firm but reformatory, with no

hint of injustice, and full proof of guilt. For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the South had no

machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and

tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a mem ber of that police. Thus grew up a double

system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of redhanded

criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimi nation. For, as I have

said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of

criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free

Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks.

It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man's conviction on almost any

charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of in justice and oppression, and upon those

When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of petty stealing and vagrancy we began to have

highway rob bery, burglary, murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the colorline: the

Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest

deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one's own social caste, was lost, and the criminal was looked upon as

crucified rather than hanged. On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt or innocence

of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is

bound to increase crime, and has increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added

motives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention

But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the

preventing of the young from being trained to crime. And here again the peculiar conditions of the South

have prevented proper pre cautions. I have seen twelveyearold boys working in chains on the public

streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and this

indiscriminate mingling of men and women and children makes the chaingangs perfect schools of crime and

debauch ery. The struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other States, is the

one encouraging sign of the awakening of some communities to the suicidal results of this policy.

It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the homes, the greatest means of training

decent selfrespecting citizens. We have been so hotly engaged re cently in discussing tradeschools and

the higher education that the pitiable plight of the publicschool system in the South has almost dropped

from view. Of every five dollars spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white schools get four

dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the white publicschool system, save in the cities, is bad and

cries for reform. If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am becoming more and more convinced, as

I look upon the system of commonschool training in the South, that the national government must soon step

in and aid popular education in some way. Today it has been only by the most strenuous efforts on the part

of the thinking men of the South that the Negro's share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance

in some halfdozen States; and that move ment not only is not dead, but in many communities is gaining

strength. What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in

severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludi crously inadequate commonschool

facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the

fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will

I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, eco nomic, and political relations of the Negroes and

whites in the South, as I have conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and education. But

after all that has been said on these more tangible matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential

to a proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or fix in terms easily understood by

strangers. It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one little actions

which go to make up life. In any community or nation it is these little things which are most elusive to the

grasp and yet most essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole. What is thus true of all

communities is peculiarly true of the South, where, outside of written history and outside of printed law, there

has been going on for a generation as deep a storm and stress of human souls, as intense a ferment of feeling,

as intricate a writhing of spirit, as ever a people experienced. Within and without the sombre veil of color vast

social forces have been at work,efforts for human betterment, movements toward disintegration and

despair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human

hearts which have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.

The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the mil lions of black freedmen and their sons, whose

destiny is so fatefully bound up with that of the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the South sees at

first little of this. He notes the growing frequency of dark faces as he rides along,but otherwise the days

slip lazily on, the sun shines, and this little world seems as happy and contented as other worlds he has

visited. Indeed, on the question of questionsthe Negro problemhe hears so little that there almost seems

to be a conspiracy of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it, and then usually in a farfetched

academic way, and indeed almost every one seems to forget and ignore the darker half of the land, until the

astonished visitor is inclined to ask if after all there IS any problem here. But if he lingers long enough there

comes the awakening: perhaps in a sudden whirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity;

more likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had not at first noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes

begin to catch the shadows of the colorline: here he meets crowds of Negroes and whites; then he is

suddenly aware that he cannot discover a single dark face; or again at the close of a day's wandering he may

find himself in some strange assembly, where all faces are tinged brown or black, and where he has the

vague, uncomfortable feeling of the stranger. He realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about

flows by him in two great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle their

waters in seeming carelessness, then they divide and flow wide apart. It is done quietly; no mistakes are

made, or if one occurs, the swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as when

the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for talking together on Whitehall Street in

Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical contact and

daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the

thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of

the other. Before and directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic servants in the

best of the white families, there were bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, be

tween the races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often attended the same church, and

talked and conversed with each other. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally

meant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of ministers, teachers, physicians,

merchants, mechanics, and independent farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of

the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of the whites, there is little or no intellectual com

merce. They go to separate churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly separated in all public

gatherings, they travel separately, and they are beginning to read dif ferent papers and books. To most

libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly

galling to the pride of the very classes who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the

doings of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so on, throughout the category of

means for intellectual communication,schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment, and the like,it

is usually true that the very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the

land ought to be in complete under standing and sympathy, are so far strangers that one side thinks all

whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover,

in a land where the tyranny of public opinion and the intoler ance of criticism is for obvious historical

reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as

the Negro, is bound and barred by the colorline, and many a scheme of friendliness and philan thropy, of

broadminded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has dropped stillborn because some

busy body has forced the colorquestion to the front and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law

It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social contact between the races. Nothing has

come to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the radical and

more uncompromis ing drawing of the colorline in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear.

In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes

and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more

than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches, one can imagine the consequences of the almost

utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and

Here there can be none of that social going down to the people,the opening of heart and hand of the best to

the worst, in generous acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny. On the other hand, in

matters of simple almsgiving, where there can be no question of social contact, and in the succor of the aged

and sick, the South, as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is gener ous to a fault. The black

beggar is never turned away without a good deal more than a crust, and a call for help for the unfortunate

meets quick response. I remember, one cold win ter, in Atlanta, when I refrained from contributing to a

public relief fund lest Negroes should be discriminated against, I afterward inquired of a friend: "Were any

And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human advancement is not a mere question of

almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity. And here is a

land where, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher striving for the good and noble and true, the

colorline comes to separate natural friends and coworkers; while at the bottom of the social group, in the

saloon, the gamblinghell, and the brothel, that same line wavers and disappears.

I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations between the sons of master and man in the South. I

have not glossed over matters for policy's sake, for I fear we have already gone too far in that sort of thing.

On the other hand, I have sincerely sought to let no unfair exaggerations creep in. I do not doubt that in some

Southern communities conditions are better than those I have indicated; while I am no less certain that in

Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to interest and perplex the best conscience of the South.

Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites, they feel acutely the false position in

which the Negro problems place them. Such an essentially honesthearted and generous people cannot cite

the castelevelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all men, without coming

to feel more and more with each generation that the present drawing of the colorline is a flat contradic tion

to their beliefs and professions. But just as often as they come to this point, the present social condition of the

Negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most openminded: if there were nothing to charge

against the Negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be

comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a

selfrespecting group hold anything but the least possi ble fellowship with such persons and survive? and

shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or the hope of our children? The

argument so put is of great strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of thinking Negroes:

granted, they reply, that the condition of our masses is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate

historical cause for this, and unmistakable evidence that no small number have, in spite of tremendous

disadvantages, risen to the level of American civilization. And when, by proscription and prejudice, these

same Negroes are classed with and treated like the lowest of their people, simply because they are Negroes,

such a policy not only discourages thrift and intelligence among black men, but puts a direct premium on the

very things you complain of,inefficiency and crime. Draw lines of crime, of incompetency, of vice, as

tightly and uncompromisingly as you will, for these things must be proscribed; but a colorline not only does

In the face of two such arguments, the future of the South depends on the ability of the representatives of

these opposing views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other's position,for the Negro to

realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white

people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a

colorprejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose in the same despised class.

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor

for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as

reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or

neither can improve to any great extent. The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary ten dencies and

unreasoning drawing of the colorline indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the

condition of the Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination. Only by a union of intelligence and

sympathy across the colorline in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph,

Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder, What are these dreams to foolish babbling men Who cry with

It was out in the country, far from home, far from my foster home, on a dark Sunday night. The road

wandered from our rambling loghouse up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear

dimly across the fields a rhythmic cadence of song,soft, thrilling, powerful, that swelled and died

sorrowfully in our ears. I was a country schoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a

Southern Negro revival. To be sure, we in Berkshire were not perhaps as stiff and formal as they in Suffolk of

olden time; yet we were very quiet and subdued, and I know not what would have happened those clear

Sabbath mornings had some one punctuated the sermon with a wild scream, or interrupted the long prayer

with a loud Amen! And so most striking to me, as I approached the village and the little plain church perched

aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed that mass of black folk. A sort of suppressed terror

hung in the air and seemed to seize us,a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality

to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to

his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the gauntcheeked

brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about

came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.

Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival in the untouched backwoods of the South

can but dimly realize the religious feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and funny,

but as seen they are awful. Three things characterized this religion of the slave, the Preacher, the Music,

and the Frenzy. The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on Amer ican soil. A

leader, a politician, an orator, a "boss," an intriguer, an idealist,all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a

group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep

seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain it.

The type, of course, varies according to time and place, from the West Indies in the sixteenth century to New

England in the nine teenth, and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New Orleans or New York.

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which,

despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and

longing yet born on American soil. Sprung from the African forests, where its counterpart can still be heard,

it was adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soullife of the slave, until, under the stress of law and

whip, it became the one true expression of a people's sorrow, despair, and hope.

Finally the Frenzy of "Shouting," when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him

mad with supernatural joy, was the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in

than all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the

mad abandon of physical fervor, the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild

waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but

old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that many generations

firmly be lieved that without this visible manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with

These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed up to the time of Emancipation. Since

under the peculiar circumstances of the black man's environment they were the one expression of his higher

life, they are of deep interest to the student of his development, both socially and psychologically. Numerous

are the attractive lines of inquiry that here group themselves. What did slavery mean to the African savage?

What was his attitude toward the World and Life? What seemed to him good and evil,God and Devil?

Whither went his longings and strivings, and wherefore were his heartburnings and disappointments?

Answers to such questions can come only from a study of Negro religion as a development, through its

gradual changes from the heathen ism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of Chicago.

Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though they be slaves, cannot be without potent

influence upon their contemporaries. The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to

the silent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts. Especially is this noticeable in the South,

where theology and religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North, and where the

religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro thought and methods. The mass of "gospel" hymns which

has swept through American churches and wellnigh ruined our sense of song consists largely of debased

imita tions of Negro melodies made by ears that caught the jingle but not the music, the body but not the

soul, of the Jubilee songs. It is thus clear that the study of Negro religion is not only a vital part of the history

The Negro church of today is the social centre of Negro life in the United States, and the most characteristic

expres sion of African character. Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the "First Baptist"a

roomy brick edi fice seating five hundred or more persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet,

a small organ, and stained glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly room with benches. This building

is the central clubhouse of a commu nity of a thousand or more Negroes. Various organizations meet

here,the church proper, the Sundayschool, two or three insurance societies, women's societies, secret

societies, and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held beside the five

or six regular weekly religious services. Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here,

employment is found for the idle, strang ers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distri buted.

At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power. Depravity,

Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and

few indeed of the community have the hardihood to withstand conversion. Back of this more formal religion,

the Church often stands as a real conserver of morals, a strengthener of family life, and the final authority on

Thus one can see in the Negro church today, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the

Negro is cut off by colorprejudice and social condition. In the great city churches the same tendency is

noticeable and in many re spects emphasized. A great church like the Bethel of Phila delphia has over

eleven hundred members, an edifice seating fifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand

dollars, an annual budget of five thousand dollars, and a government consisting of a pastor with several

assisting local preachers, an executive and legislative board, financial boards and tax collectors; general

church meetings for making laws; subdivided groups led by class leaders, a company of militia, and

twentyfour auxiliary societies. The activity of a church like this is immense and farreaching, and the

bishops who preside over these organizations throughout the land are among the most powerful Negro rulers

Such churches are really governments of men, and conse quently a little investigation reveals the curious

fact that, in the South, at least, practically every American Negro is a church member. Some, to be sure, are

not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend services; but, practically, a proscribed people must

have a social centre, and that centre for this people is the Negro church. The census of 1890 showed nearly

twentyfour thousand Negro churches in the country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a half

millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty eight persons, and in some Southern States one in

every two persons. Besides these there is the large number who, while not enrolled as members, attend and

take part in many of the activities of the church. There is an organized Negro church for every sixty black

families in the nation, and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a thousand dollars'

Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since Emancipation. The question now is, What

have been the successive steps of this social history and what are the present tendencies? First, we must

realize that no such institu tion as the Negro church could rear itself without definite historical foundations.

These foundations we can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in America.

He was brought from a definite social environment, the polygamous clan life under the headship of the

chief and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was nature worship, with profound belief in

invisible surrounding influ ences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and sacrifice. The

first rude change in this life was the slave ship and the West Indian sugarfields. The plantation organi

zation replaced the clan and tribe, and the white master replaced the chief with far greater and more despotic

powers. Forced and longcontinued toil became the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship

disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and polyan dry, which, in some cases,

almost reached promiscuity. It was a terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the

former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest or Medicineman. He early appeared on

the plantation and found his function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter

of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the

longing, disappoint ment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard, physician, judge,

and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the

first church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and

mingling of heathen rites among the members of each planta tion, and roughly designated as Voodooism.

Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of expediency gave these rites an early veneer of

Christianity, and after the lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.

Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the church. First, it became almost entirely Baptist and

Methodist in faith; secondly, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the monogamic Negro

home. From the very circum stances of its beginning, the church was confined to the plantation, and

consisted primarily of a series of disconnected units; although, later on, some freedom of movement was

allowed, still this geographical limitation was always impor tant and was one cause of the spread of the

decentralized and democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the visible rite of baptism

appealed strongly to their mystic temperament. Today the Baptist Church is still largest in membership

among Negroes, and has a million and a half communicants. Next in popularity came the churches organ

ized in connection with the white neighboring churches, chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few

Episcopalian and others. The Methodists still form the second greatest denomination, with nearly a million

members. The faith of these two leading denominations was more suited to the slave church from the

prominence they gave to religious feeling and fervor. The Negro membership in other denominations has

always been small and relatively unimportant, although the Episcopalians and Presbyterians are gaining

among the more intelligent classes today, and the Catholic Church is making headway in certain sections.

After Emancipation, and still earlier in the North, the Negro churches largely severed such affili ations as

they had had with the white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptist churches became inde

pendent, but the Methodists were compelled early to unite for purposes of episcopal government. This gave

rise to the great African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the world, to the Zion Church

and the Colored Methodist, and to the black conferences and churches in this and other denominations.

The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church ante dates the Negro home, leads to an explanation of

much that is paradoxical in this communistic institution and in the morals of its members. But especially it

leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense

seldom true elsewhere. Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of the church to the more

important inner ethical life of the people who com pose it. The Negro has already been pointed out many

times as a religious animal,a being of that deep emotional nature which turns instinctively toward the

supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appre ciation of Nature, the

transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of strange

influences,of Good to be implored, of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph of

Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Underworld were striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and

revenge filled his heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,exorcism and witchcraft, the

mysterious Obi wor ship with its barbarious rites, spells, and bloodsacrifice even, now and then, of human

victims. Weird midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the witchwoman and the

voodoopriest became the centre of Negro group life, and that vein of vague superstition which characterizes

In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons, the Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of

revolt gradually died away under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters. By the

middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of

a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his

condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity.

Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long

system of repres sion and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which

made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the

exquisite native appreciation of the beau tiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro,

losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of

the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should

lead His dark children home,this became his comforting dream. His preacher repeated the prophecy, and

This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in "Un cle Tom," came soon to breed, as all fatalistic

faiths will, the sensualist side by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of the plantation, where

marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a religion of resignation and submission

degenerated easily, in less strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of the worst

characteristics of the Negro masses of today had their seed in this period of the slave's ethical growth. Here

it was that the Home was ruined under the very shadow of the Church, white and black; here habits of

With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of a class of free Negroes came a

change. We often neglect the influence of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers

and the small weight he had in the history of the nation. But we must not forget that his chief influence was

internal,was exerted on the black world; and that there he was the ethical and social leader. Huddled as he

was in a few centres like Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into

poverty and listlessness; but not all of them. The free Negro leader early arose and his chief characteristic was

intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery question. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a

dream. His religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a note of revenge, into his

songs a day of reckoning close at hand. The "Coming of the Lord" swept this side of Death, and came to be a

thing to be hoped for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible discussion this de sire for

freedom seized the black millions still in bondage, and became their one ideal of life. The black bards caught

"O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me! Before I'll be a slave I'll be buried in my grave, And go home

For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified itself with the dream of Abolition, until

that which was a radical fad in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had become a

religion to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the freedman a literal

Coming of the Lord. His fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies, the blood and

dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind:

what had he to do with it? Was it not the Lord's doing, and marvellous in his eyes? Joyed and bewildered

with what came, he stood awaiting new wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation and

It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro religion. First, we must remember that

living as the blacks do in close contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly, the

soullife of that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or less directly by all the religious and ethical

forces that are today moving the United States. These questions and movements are, however,

overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them) allimportant question of their civil, political, and economic

status. They must perpetually discuss the "Negro Problem,"must live, move, and have their being in it, and

interpret all else in its light or darkness. With this come, too, peculiar problems of their inner life,of the

status of women, the maintenance of Home, the training of children, the accumulation of wealth, and the

prevention of crime. All this must mean a time of intense ethical ferment, of religious heartsearching and

intel lectual unrest. From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American,

as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,from

this must arise a painful self consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy

which is fatal to selfconfidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and

changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching

of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double

duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to

In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly picture the peculiar ethical paradox

that faces the Negro of today and is tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights and his

dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever more deaf to his righteous appeal,

and that all the reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength and fresh

allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma. Con scious of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often

becomes bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is a complaint and a curse, a wail rather

than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith. On the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder and keener and

more tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the antiNegro movement its patent weaknesses, and with

Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no ethical considera tions in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the black

man's strength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the

danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands almost ready to

curse God and die, and the other is too often found a traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is

wedded to ideals remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets that life is more than

meat and the body more than raiment. But, after all, is not this simply the writhing of the age translated into

black, the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture, faces the hideousness of the anarchist

Today the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in the South, represent these divergent

ethical tend encies, the first tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It is no

idle regret with which the white South mourns the loss of the oldtime Negro,the frank, honest, simple old

servant who stood for the earlier religious age of submission and humility. With all his lazi ness and lack of

many elements of true manhood, he was at least openhearted, faithful, and sincere. Today he is gone, but

who is to blame for his going? Is it not those very persons who mourn for him? Is it not the tendency, born of

Recon struction and Reaction, to found a society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral

fibre of a naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites threaten to become ungovernable

tyrants and the blacks criminals and hypocrites? Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the

strong, and the South used it for many years against its conquerors; today it must be prepared to see its

black proletariat turn that same twoedged weapon against itself. And how natural this is! The death of

Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present hopelessness of physical defence.

Political defence is becom ing less and less available, and economic defence is still only partially effective.

But there is a patent defence at hand,the defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the

same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their character for centuries.

Today the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and

selfassertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be

pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive

personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in

whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroit ness must, in these

growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an eco nomic

opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. With out this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this

situation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races

On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to empha size the radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his

birthright in the South by a situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive nature revolts,

he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a decent living amid the harsh competition and the color

discrimination. At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and lec tures, he is

intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in newfound

freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess, radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter

denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the

gamblinghell and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes segregate

themselves from the grouplife of both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic,

whose bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise the submission and sub

serviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can

exist side by side with its masters. Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in

which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this

bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and make it more maddening.

Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus sought to make clear wavers the mass of

the millions of Negroes, North and South; and their religious life and activity partake of this social conflict

within their ranks. Their churches are differentiating,now into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no

way distinguishable from similar white groups save in color of skin; now into large social and business

institutions catering to the desire for information and amusement of their members, warily avoiding

unpleasant questions both within and without the black world, and preach ing in effect if not in word: Dum

But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided

might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great night a new

religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the pentup vigor of ten million souls shall sweep

irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth

"Unto you a child is born," sang the bit of yellow paper that fluttered into my room one brown October

morning. Then the fear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it looked and

how it feltwhat were its eyes, and how its hair curled and crumpled itself. And I thought in awe of

her,she who had slept with Death to tear a manchild from underneath her heart, while I was

unconsciously wan dering. I fled to my wife and child, repeating the while to myself half wonderingly,

"Wife and child? Wife and child?" fled fast and faster than boat and steamcar, and yet must ever

impatiently await them; away from the hardvoiced city, away from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire

Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the sanctuary on whose altar a life at my

bidding had offered itself to win a life, and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn wail from an

unknown world, all head and voice? I handle it curiously, and watch per plexed its winking, breathing,

and sneezing. I did not love it then; it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my girlmother, she

whom now I saw unfolding like the glory of the morningthe transfigured woman. Through her I came to

love the wee thing, as it grew strong; as its little soul un folded itself in twitter and cry and halfformed

word, and as its eyes caught the gleam and flash of life. How beautiful he was, with his olivetinted flesh and

dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll

which the blood of Africa had moulded into his features! I held him in my arms, after we had sped far away

from our Southern home,held him, and glanced at the hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a

hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest. Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in

my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?for brown were his father's

eyes, and his father's father's. And thus in the Land of the Colorline I saw, as it fell across my baby, the

Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,a Negro and a Negro's son. Holding in

that little headah, bitterly!he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled handah,

wearily!to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into

my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the Veil as it

passed over my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the bloodred land. I held my face beside his little

cheek, showed him the starchildren and the twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an

So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a

life but eighteen months distant from the Alllife,we were not far from worshipping this revelation of the

divine, my wife and I. Her own life builded and moulded itself upon the child; he tinged her every dream and

idealized her every effort. No hands but hers must touch and garnish those little limbs; no dress or frill must

touch them that had not wearied her fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland, and she and

he together spoke some soft and unknown tongue and in it held communion. I too mused above his little

white bed; saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength of

his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world; heard in his

And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the full flush of the long Southern spring,

till the hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun quivered its awful

light over the hills of Atlanta. And then one night the little feet pattered wearily to the wee white bed, and the

tiny hands trembled; and a warm flushed face tossed on the pillow, and we knew baby was sick. Ten days he

lay there,a swift week and three endless days, wasting, wasting away. Cheerily the mother nursed him the

first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled again. Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the

Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless terror, and joy and sleep slipped away. I hear now that

Voice at midnight calling me from dull and dreamless trance,crying, "The Shadow of Death! The Shadow

of Death!" Out into the starlight I crept, to rouse the gray physician,the Shadow of Death, the Shadow of

Death. The hours trembled on; the night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a tired thing across the

lamplight. Then we two alone looked upon the child as he turned toward us with great eyes, and stretched his

He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the western hills, veiling its face; when

the winds spoke not, and the trees, the great green trees he loved, stood motionless. I saw his breath beat

quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of

darkness in its train. The day changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the windows, the same green grass

glinted in the setting sun. Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thinga childless

I shirk not. I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving. I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush

of the storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not this my life

hard enough,is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold enough,is not all the

world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here, thou, O Death?

About my head the thundering storm beat like a heartless voice, and the crazy forest pulsed with the curses of

the weak; but what cared I, within my home beside my wife and baby boy? Wast thou so jealous of one little

A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make it brighter,sweet as a summer's day beside the

Housatonic. The world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful

eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered about him. I can see him now, chang ing like the sky from

sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, and then to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world. He

knew no colorline, poor dearand the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun. He

loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and

unclothed. Iyea, all menare larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life. She who in

simple clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said when he had flown, "He will be happy There; he ever

loved beautiful things." And I, far more ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own weaving, sit alone

winding words and muttering, "If still he be, and he be There, and there be a There, let him be happy, O

Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and sweetsmelling flowers. The trees whispered to

the grass, but the children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,the wraith of Life.

We seemed to rum ble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a

song in our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those palefaced hurrying men and

We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there is strangely red; so we bore him away

to the northward, with his flowers and his little folded hands. In vain, in vain!for where, O God! beneath

thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a

All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,nay, blame me not if I see the world

thus darkly through the Veil,and my soul whispers ever to me saying, "Not dead, not dead, but escaped;

not bond, but free." No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall

madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and

deformed within the Veil! I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated

past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of his little curlcrowned head did there

not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth,

shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy,

before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to

cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.

Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we,aye, and found it lighter too, some day;

for surely, surely this is not the end. Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set

the prisoned free. Not for me,I shall die in my bonds,but for fresh young souls who have not known the

night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not "Is he white?" but "Can he

work?" When men ask artists, not "Are they black?" but "Do they know?" Some morning this may be, long,

long years to come. But now there wails, on that dark shore within the Veil, the same deep voice, THOU

SHALT FOREGO! And all have I foregone at that command, and with small complaint,all save that fair

If one must have gone, why not I? Why may I not rest me from this restlessness and sleep from this wide

waking? Was not the world's alembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so

many workers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away? The

wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his

cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to speak. Perhaps now he knows the Alllove, and needs not to be wise.

Sleep, then, child,sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feetabove

This is the story of a human heart,the tale of a black boy who many long years ago began to struggle with

life that he might know the world and know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that lay

gray and dismal before the wondereyes of the child: the temptation of Hate, that stood out against the red

dawn; the temptation of Despair, that darkened noonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that ever steals along

with twilight. Above all, you must hear of the vales he crossed,the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of

I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforce com mencement season, amid its bustle and crush. Tall,

frail, and black he stood, with simple dignity and an unmistakable air of good breeding. I talked with him

apart, where the storming of the lusty young orators could not harm us. I spoke to him politely, then

curiously, then eagerly, as I began to feel the fineness of his character,his calm courtesy, the sweetness of

his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth of life. Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one

bows before the prophets of the world. Some seer he seemed, that came not from the crimson Past or the gray

Tocome, but from the pulsing Now,that mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark, so

splendid and sordid. Fourscore years had he wandered in this same world of mine, within the Veil.

He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay adying amid the echoes of Manila and El Caney:

stirring times for living, times dark to look back upon, darker to look forward to. The blackfaced lad that

paused over his mud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas as he looked down the world. The

slaveship still groaned across the Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern breeze, and the great black

father whispered mad tales of cruelty into those young ears. From the low doorway the mother silently

watched her boy at play, and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him away to the land of

So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curi ously a vision of Life; and in the midst of that vision

ever stood one dark figure alone,ever with the hard, thick coun tenance of that bitter father, and a form

that fell in vast and shapeless folds. Thus the temptation of Hate grew and shad owed the growing

child,gliding stealthily into his laughter, fading into his play, and seizing his dreams by day and night with

rough, rude turbulence. So the black boy asked of sky and sun and flower the neveranswered Why? and

Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide land today a thousand thousand dark

children brood before this same temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps, some

one will some day lift the Veil,will come tenderly and cheerily into those sad little lives and brush the

brooding hate away, just as Beriah Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before the

bluff, kindhearted man the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green had a school in Oneida County, New

York, with a score of mischievous boys. "I'm going to bring a black boy here to educate," said Beriah Green,

as only a crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say. "Oho!" laughed the boys. "Yees," said his wife;

and Alexander came. Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and hungry, four

hundred miles up into free New Hampshire, to Canaan. But the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to

the abolition schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp. The black boy trudged away.

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy, the age when half wonderingly we began to

descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and

tramps and thieves, and millionaires andsometimesNegroes, became throbbing souls whose warm

pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow

and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?" And then all helplessly we peered into those

So in that little Oneida school there came to those school boys a revelation of thought and longing beneath

one black skin, of which they had not dreamed before. And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of sympathy

and inspiration. The shadowy, formless thingthe temptation of Hate, that hovered between him and the

worldgrew fainter and less sinister. It did not wholly fade away, but diffused itself and lingered thick at the

edges. Through it the child now first saw the blue and gold of life,the sunswept road that ran 'twixt

heaven and earth until in one faroff wan wavering line they met and kissed. A vision of life came to the

growing boy, mystic, wonderful. He raised his head, stretched himself, breathed deep of the fresh new air.

Yonder, behind the forests, he heard strange sounds; then glinting through the trees he saw, far, far away, the

bronzed hosts of a nation calling,calling faintly, calling loudly. He heard the hateful clank of their chains;

he felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within him a protest and a prophecy. And he girded himself to

A voice and vision called him to be a priest,a seer to lead the uncalled out of the house of bondage. He saw

the headless host turn toward him like the whirling of mad waters,he stretched forth his hands eagerly, and

then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there swept across the vision the temptation of Despair.

They were not wicked men,the problem of life is not the problem of the wicked,they were calm, good

men, Bishops of the Apostolic Church of God, and strove toward righteous ness. They said slowly, "It is all

very naturalit is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church

cannot admit a Negro." And when that thin, halfgrotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put their

hands kindly, half sorrowfully, on his shoulders, and said, "Now,of course, wewe know how YOU feel

about it; but you see it is impossible,that iswellit is prema ture. Sometime, we trustsincerely

This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it doggedly. Like some grave shadow he

flitted by those halls, pleading, arguing, half angrily demanding admit tance, until there came the final NO:

until men hustled the disturber away, marked him as foolish, unreasonable, and injudicious, a vain rebel

against God's law. And then from that Vision Splendid all the glory faded slowly away, and left an earth gray

and stern rolling on beneath a dark despair. Even the kind hands that stretched themselves toward him from

out the depths of that dull morning seemed but parts of the purple shadows. He saw them coldly, and asked,

"Why should I strive by special grace when the way of the world is closed to me?" All gently yet, the hands

urged him on,the hands of young John Jay, that daring father's daring son; the hands of the good folk of

Boston, that free city. And yet, with a way to the priesthood of the Church open at last before him, the cloud

lingered there; and even when in old St. Paul's the venerable Bishop raised his white arms above the Negro

deaconeven then the burden had not lifted from that heart, for there had passed a glory from the earth.

And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went did not burn in vain. Slowly and more soberly he

took up again his plan of life. More critically he studied the situation. Deep down below the slavery and

servitude of the Negro people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long years of mistreatment had

emphasized. The dearth of strong moral character, of unbending righteousness, he felt, was their great

shortcoming, and here he would begin. He would gather the best of his people into some little Episcopal

chapel and there lead, teach, and inspire them, till the leaven spread, till the children grew, till the world

hearkened, tilltilland then across his dream gleamed some faint afterglow of that first fair vision of

One dayit was in 1842, and the springtide was struggling merrily with the May winds of New

Englandhe stood at last in his own chapel in Providence, a priest of the Church. The days sped by, and the

dark young clergyman labored; he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his prayers with a soft, earnest

voice; he haunted the streets and accosted the wayfarers; he visited the sick, and knelt beside the dying. He

worked and toiled, week by week, day by day, month by month. And yet month by month the congregation

dwindled, week by week the hollow walls echoed more sharply, day by day the calls came fewer and fewer,

and day by day the third temptation sat clearer and still more clearly within the Veil; a temptation, as it were,

bland and smiling, with just a shade of mockery in its smooth tones. First it came casually, in the cadence of a

voice: "Oh, colored folks? Yes." Or perhaps more definitely: "What do you EXPECT?" In voice and gesture

lay the doubtthe temptation of Doubt. How he hated it, and stormed at it furiously! "Of course they are

capable," he cried; "of course they can learn and strive and achieve" and "Of course," added the temptation

softly, "they do nothing of the sort." Of all the three temptations, this one struck the deepest. Hate? He had

outgrown so childish a thing. Despair? He had steeled his right arm against it, and fought it with the vigor of

determination. But to doubt the worth of his lifework,to doubt the destiny and capability of the race his

soul loved because it was his; to find listless squalor instead of eager endeavor; to hear his own lips whisper

ing, "They do not care; they cannot know; they are dumb driven cattle,why cast your pearls before

swine?"this, this seemed more than man could bear; and he closed the door, and sank upon the steps of the

The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in the gloomy chapel when he arose. He folded his

vestments, put away the hymnbooks, and closed the great Bible. He stepped out into the twilight, looked

back upon the narrow little pulpit with a weary smile, and locked the door. Then he walked briskly to the

Bishop, and told the Bishop what the Bishop already knew. "I have failed," he said simply. And gaining

courage by the confession, he added: "What I need is a larger constituency. There are comparatively few

Negroes here, and perhaps they are not of the best. I must go where the field is wider, and try again." So the

Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps, corpulent, redfaced, and the author of several

thrilling tracts on Apostolic Succession. It was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled himself for a pleasant

season of contemplation, when the bell must needs ring, and there must burst in upon the Bishop a letter and

a thin, ungainly Negro. Bishop Onderdonk read the letter hastily and frowned. Fortunately, his mind was

already clear on this point; and he cleared his brow and looked at Crummell. Then he said, slowly and

impressively: "I will receive you into this diocese on one condition: no Negro priest can sit in my church

I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black figure, nervously twitching his hat before the massive

abdo men of Bishop Onderdonk; his threadbare coat thrown against the dark woodwork of the bookcases,

where Fox's "Lives of the Martyrs" nestled happily beside "The Whole Duty of Man." I seem to see the wide

eyes of the Negro wander past the Bishop's broadcloth to where the swinging glass doors of the cabinet glow

in the sunlight. A little blue fly is trying to cross the yawning keyhole. He marches briskly up to it, peers into

the chasm in a surprised sort of way, and rubs his feelers reflectively; then he essays its depths, and, finding it

bottom less, draws back again. The darkfaced priest finds himself wondering if the fly too has faced its

Valley of Humiliation, and if it will plunge into it,when lo! it spreads its tiny wings and buzzes merrily

Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. The rich walls wheeled away, and before him lay the cold

rough moor winding on through life, cut in twain by one thick granite ridge,here, the Valley of

Humiliation; yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And I know not which be darker,no, not I. But

this I know: in yonder Vale of the Humble stand today a million swarthy men, who willingly would

all this and more would they bear did they but know that this were sacrifice and not a meaner thing. So

surged the thought within that lone black breast. The Bishop cleared his throat suggestively; then,

recollecting that there was really nothing to say, considerately said nothing, only sat tapping his foot

impatiently. But Alexander Crummell said, slowly and heav ily: "I will never enter your diocese on such

terms." And saying this, he turned and passed into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. You might have noted

only the physical dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul lay deeper death than that. He

found a chapel in New York, the church of his father; he labored for it in poverty and starvation, scorned

by his fellow priests. Half in despair, he wandered across the sea, a beggar with outstretched hands.

Englishmen clasped them,Wilberforce and Stanley, Thirwell and Ingles, and even Froude and Macaulay;

Sir Benjamin Brodie bade him rest awhile at Queen's College in Cam bridge, and there he lingered,

struggling for health of body and mind, until he took his degree in '53. Restless still, and unsatisfied, he

turned toward Africa, and for long years, amid the spawn of the slavesmugglers, sought a new heaven and a

So the man groped for light; all this was not Life,it was the worldwandering of a soul in search of itself,

the striving of one who vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a death that is

more than death,the passing of a soul that has missed its duty. Twenty years he wandered,twenty years

and more; and yet the hard rasping question kept gnawing within him, "What, in God's name, am I on earth

for?" In the narrow New York parish his soul seemed cramped and smothered. In the fine old air of the

English University he heard the millions wailing over the sea. In the wild fevercursed swamps of West

You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,you who in the swift whirl of living, amid its cold paradox

and marvel lous vision, have fronted life and asked its riddle face to face. And if you find that riddle hard to

read, remember that yonder black boy finds it just a little harder; if it is difficult for you to find and face your

duty, it is a shade more difficult for him; if your heart sickens in the blood and dust of battle, remember that

to him the dust is thicker and the battle fiercer. No wonder the wanderers fall! No wonder we point to thief

and murderer, and haunting prostitute, and the neverending throng of unhearsed dead! The Valley of the

But Alexander Crummell it gave back. Out of the tempta tion of Hate, and burned by the fire of Despair,

triumphant over Doubt, and steeled by Sacrifice against Humiliation, he turned at last home across the waters,

humble and strong, gentle and determined. He bent to all the gibes and prejudices, to all hatred and

discrimination, with that rare courtesy which is the armor of pure souls. He fought among his own, the low,

the grasping, and the wicked, with that unbending righteousness which is the sword of the just. He never fal

tered, he seldom complained; he simply worked, inspiring the young, rebuking the old, helping the weak,

So he grew, and brought within his wide influence all that was best of those who walk within the Veil. They

who live without knew not nor dreamed of that full power within, that mighty inspiration which the dull

gauze of caste decreed that most men should not know. And now that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and

cry, Lo! the soul to whose dear memory I bring this little tribute. I can see his face still, dark and heavylined

beneath his snowy hair; lighting and shading, now with inspiration for the future, now in innocent pain at

some human wickedness, now with sorrow at some hard memory from the past. The more I met Alexander

Crummell, the more I felt how much that world was losing which knew so little of him. In another age he

might have sat among the elders of the land in purplebordered toga; in another country mothers might have

He did his work,he did it nobly and well; and yet I sorrow that here he worked alone, with so little human

sym pathy. His name today, in this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden with no

incense of memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,all men

know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,who is good? not that men are ignorant, what is

He sat one morning gazing toward the sea. He smiled and said, "The gate is rusty on the hinges." That night

at star rise a wind came moaning out of the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul I loved fled like a

I wonder where he is today? I wonder if in that dim world beyond, as he came gliding in, there rose on some

wan throne a King,a dark and pierced Jew, who knows the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, as he

laid those heartwrung talents down, "Well done!" while round about the morning stars sat singing.

Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a great black bridge, down a hill and up

again, by little shops and meatmarkets, past singlestoried homes, until sud denly it stops against a wide

green lawn. It is a broad, restful place, with two large buildings outlined against the west. When at evening

the winds come swelling from the east, and the great pall of the city's smoke hangs wearily above the valley,

then the red west glows like a dreamland down Car lisle Street, and, at the tolling of the supperbell, throws

the passing forms of students in dark silhouette against the sky. Tall and black, they move slowly by, and

seem in the sinister light to flit before the city like dim warning ghosts. Perhaps they are; for this is Wells

Institute, and these black students have few dealings with the white city below.

And if you will notice, night after night, there is one dark form that ever hurries last and late toward the

twinkling lights of Swain Hall,for Jones is never on time. A long, strag gling fellow he is, brown and

hardhaired, who seems to be growing straight out of his clothes, and walks with a half apologetic roll. He

used perpetually to set the quiet dining room into waves of merriment, as he stole to his place after the bell

had tapped for prayers; he seemed so perfectly awk ward. And yet one glance at his face made one forgive

him much,that broad, goodnatured smile in which lay no bit of art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling

He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the gnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia, where the

sea croons to the sands and the sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising only here

and there in long, low islands. The white folk of Altamaha voted John a good boy,fine ploughhand, good

in the ricefields, handy everywhere, and always goodnatured and respectful. But they shook their heads

when his mother wanted to send him off to school. "It'll spoil him,ruin him," they said; and they talked as

though they knew. But full half the black folk followed him proudly to the station, and carried his queer little

trunk and many bundles. And there they shook and shook hands, and the girls kissed him shyly and the boys

clapped him on the back. So the train came, and he pinched his little sister lovingly, and put his great arms

about his mother's neck, and then was away with a puff and a roar into the great yellow world that flamed and

flared about the doubtful pilgrim. Up the coast they hurried, past the squares and palmettos of Savannah,

through the cottonfields and through the weary night, to Millville, and came with the morning to the noise

And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, and watched the train as it noisily bore playmate and

brother and son away to the world, had thereafter one everrecurring word,"When John comes." Then

what parties were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new furniture in the front room,perhaps

even a new front room; and there would be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a big

wedding; all this and morewhen John comes. But the white people shook their heads.

At first he was coming at Christmastime,but the vaca tion proved too short; and then, the next

summer,but times were hard and schooling costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And so it

drifted to the next summer, and the next,till playmates scattered, and mother grew gray, and sister went up

to the Judge's kitchen to work. And still the legend lingered,"When John comes."

Up at the Judge's they rather liked this refrain; for they too had a Johna fairhaired, smoothfaced boy,

who had played many a long summer's day to its close with his darker namesake. "Yes, sir! John is at

Princeton, sir," said the broadshouldered grayhaired Judge every morning as he marched down to the

postoffice. "Showing the Yankees what a Southern gentleman can do," he added; and strode home again

with his letters and papers. Up at the great pillared house they lingered long over the Princeton letter, the

Judge and his frail wife, his sister and growing daughters. "It'll make a man of him," said the Judge, "college

is the place." And then he asked the shy little waitress, "Well, Jennie, how's your John?" and added

reflectively, "Too bad, too bad your mother sent him offit will spoil him." And the waitress wondered.

Thus in the faraway Southern village the world lay waiting, half consciously, the coming of two young men,

and dreamed in an inarticulate way of new things that would be done and new thoughts that all would think.

And yet it was singular that few thought of two Johns,for the black folk thought of one John, and he was

black; and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. And neither world thought the other

Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzled at the case of John Jones. For a long time the clay

seemed unfit for any sort of moulding. He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and never

able to work consecutively at anything. He did not know how to study; he had no idea of thoroughness; and

with his tardiness, carelessness, and appall ing goodhumor, we were sore perplexed. One night we sat in

facultymeeting, worried and serious; for Jones was in trouble again. This last escapade was too much, and

so we solemnly voted "that Jones, on account of repeated disorder and inat tention to work, be suspended

It seemed to us that the first time life ever struck Jones as a really serious thing was when the Dean told him

he must leave school. He stared at the grayhaired man blankly, with great eyes. "Why,why," he faltered,

"butI haven't grad uated!" Then the Dean slowly and clearly explained, remind ing him of the tardiness

and the carelessness, of the poor lessons and neglected work, of the noise and disorder, until the fellow hung

his head in confusion. Then he said quickly, "But you won't tell mammy and sister,you won't write

mammy, now will you? For if you won't I'll go out into the city and work, and come back next term and show

you something." So the Dean promised faithfully, and John shoul dered his little trunk, giving neither word

nor look to the giggling boys, and walked down Carlisle Street to the great city, with sober eyes and a set and

Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that the serious look that crept over his boyish face that

afternoon never left it again. When he came back to us he went to work with all his rugged strength. It was a

hard struggle, for things did not come easily to him,few crowding memories of early life and teaching

came to help him on his new way; but all the world toward which he strove was of his own building, and he

builded slow and hard. As the light dawned linger ingly on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent before

the vision, or wandered alone over the green campus peering through and beyond the world of men into a

world of thought. And the thoughts at times puzzled him sorely; he could not see just why the circle was not

square, and carried it out fiftysix decimal places one midnight,would have gone further, indeed, had not

the matron rapped for lights out. He caught terrible colds lying on his back in the meadows of nights, trying

to think out the solar system; he had grave doubts as to the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and strongly suspected

the Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite his textbooks; he pondered long over every new Greek

word, and wondered why this meant that and why it couldn't mean something else, and how it must have felt

to think all things in Greek. So he thought and puzzled along for himself, pausing perplexed where others

skipped merrily, and walking steadily through the difficulties where the rest stopped and surrendered.

Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow and arrange themselves; coat

sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and collars got less soiled. Now and then his boots shone, and a new

dignity crept into his walk. And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in his eyes began to expect

something of this plodding boy. Thus he passed out of the preparatory school into college, and we who

watched him felt four more years of change, which almost transformed the tall, grave man who bowed to us

commence ment morning. He had left his queer thoughtworld and come back to a world of motion and of

men. He looked now for the first time sharply about him, and wondered he had seen so little before. He grew

slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now

the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints

and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry now

when men did not call him "Mister," he clenched his hands at the "Jim Crow" cars, and chafed at the

colorline that hemmed in him and his. A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into

his life; and he sat long hours wondering and planning a way around these crooked things. Daily he found

himself shrinking from the choked and narrow life of his native town. And yet he always planned to go back

to Altamaha,always planned to work there. Still, more and more as the day approached he hesitated with a

nameless dread; and even the day after graduation he seized with eagerness the offer of the Dean to send him

North with the quartette during the summer vacation, to sing for the Insti tute. A breath of air before the

It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were brilliant with moving men. They

reminded John of the sea, as he sat in the square and watched them, so change lessly changing, so bright and

dark, so grave and gay. He scanned their rich and faultless clothes, the way they carried their hands, the shape

of their hats; he peered into the hurry ing carriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, "This is the

World." The notion suddenly seized him to see where the world was going; since many of the richer and

brighter seemed hurrying all one way. So when a tall, lighthaired young man and a little talkative lady came

by, he rose half hesitatingly and followed them. Up the street they went, past stores and gay shops, across a

broad square, until with a hundred others they entered the high portal of a great building.

He was pushed toward the ticketoffice with the others, and felt in his pocket for the new fivedollar bill he

had hoarded. There seemed really no time for hesitation, so he drew it bravely out, passed it to the busy clerk,

and received simply a ticket but no change. When at last he realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he

knew not what, he stood stockstill amazed. "Be careful," said a low voice behind him; "you must not lynch

the colored gentleman simply because he's in your way," and a girl looked up roguishly into the eyes of her

fairhaired escort. A shade of annoyance passed over the escort's face. "You WILL not understand us at the

South," he said half impatiently, as if continuing an argument. "With all your professions, one never sees in

the North so cordial and intimate relations between white and black as are everyday occurrences with us.

Why, I remember my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little Negro named after me, and surely no

two,WELL!" The man stopped short and flushed to the roots of his hair, for there directly beside his

reserved orchestra chairs sat the Negro he had stumbled over in the hallway. He hesitated and grew pale with

anger, called the usher and gave him his card, with a few peremptory words, and slowly sat down. The lady

All this John did not see, for he sat in a halfdaze minding the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the

hall, the faint perfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part

of a world so different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had known, that he sat in

dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music of Lohengrin's swan. The infinite

beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all atune. He closed his

eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the lady's arm. And the lady drew away. A

deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that

held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had

no touch of blood! Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all? And if he had called, what right had he

Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony swelled away. He looked thoughtfully across the

hall, and wondered why the beautiful grayhaired woman looked so listless, and what the little man could be

whispering about. He would not like to be listless and idle, he thought, for he felt with the music the

movement of power within him. If he but had some masterwork, some lifeservice, hard,aye, bitter hard,

but without the cringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul. When

at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a faroff home, the great eyes of

his sister, and the dark drawn face of his mother. And his heart sank below the waters, even as the seasand

sinks by the shores of Altamaha, only to be lifted aloft again with that last ethereal wail of the swan that

It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the

shoulder and saying politely, "Will you step this way, please, sir?" A little surprised, he arose quickly at the

last tap, and, turning to leave his seat, looked full into the face of the fairhaired young man. For the first

time the young man recognized his dark boyhood playmate, and John knew that it was the Judge's son. The

White John started, lifted his hand, and then froze into his chair; the black John smiled lightly, then grimly,

and followed the usher down the aisle. The manager was sorry, very, very sorry,but he explained that some

mistake had been made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the money, of

course,and indeed felt the matter keenly, and so forth, andbefore he had finished John was gone,

walking hurriedly across the square and down the broad streets, and as he passed the park he buttoned his

coat and said, "John Jones, you're a naturalborn fool." Then he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and

tore it up; he wrote another, and threw it in the fire. Then he seized a scrap of paper and wrote: "Dear Mother

"Perhaps," said John, as he settled himself on the train, "perhaps I am to blame myself in struggling against

my manifest destiny simply because it looks hard and unpleasant. Here is my duty to Altamaha plain before

me; perhaps they'll let me help settle the Negro problems there,perhaps they won't. 'I will go in to the

King, which is not according to the law; and if I perish, I perish.'" And then he mused and dreamed, and

Down in Altamaha, after seven long years, all the world knew John was coming. The homes were scrubbed

and scoured, above all, one; the gardens and yards had an unwonted trimness, and Jennie bought a new

gingham. With some finesse and negotiation, all the dark Methodists and Presbyteri ans were induced to

join in a monster welcome at the Baptist Church; and as the day drew near, warm discussions arose on every

corner as to the exact extent and nature of John's accomplishments. It was noontide on a gray and cloudy day

when he came. The black town flocked to the depot, with a little of the white at the edges,a happy throng,

with "Good mawnings" and "Howdys" and laughing and joking and jostling. Mother sat yonder in the

window watching; but sister Jennie stood on the platform, nervously fingering her dress, tall and lithe, with

soft brown skin and loving eyes peering from out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose gloomily as the train

stopped, for he was thinking of the "Jim Crow" car; he stepped to the platform, and paused: a little dingy

station, a black crowd gaudy and dirty, a halfmile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of mud.

An over whelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all seized him; he looked in vain for his

mother, kissed coldly the tall, strange girl who called him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and there;

then, lingering neither for hand shaking nor gossip, started silently up the street, raising his hat merely to the

last eager old aunty, to her openmouthed astonishment. The people were distinctly bewildered. This silent,

cold man,was this John? Where was his smile and hearty handgrasp? "'Peared kind o' down in the mouf,"

said the Methodist preacher thoughtfully. "Seemed monstus stuck up," complained a Baptist sister. But the

white post master from the edge of the crowd expressed the opinion of his folks plainly. "That damn

Nigger," said he, as he shoul dered the mail and arranged his tobacco, "has gone North and got plum full o'

The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was a failure. Rain spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned

the milk in the icecream. When the speaking came at night, the house was crowded to overflowing. The

three preachers had especially prepared themselves, but somehow John's manner seemed to throw a blanket

over everything,he seemed so cold and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint that the

Methodist brother could not warm up to his theme and elicited not a single "Amen"; the Presbyterian prayer

was but feebly responded to, and even the Baptist preacher, though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so

mixed up in his favorite sentence that he had to close it by stopping fully fifteen minutes sooner than he

meant. The people moved uneasily in their seats as John rose to reply. He spoke slowly and methodically.

The age, he said, demanded new ideas; we were far different from those men of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries,with broader ideas of human brother hood and destiny. Then he spoke of the rise of

charity and popular education, and particularly of the spread of wealth and work. The question was, then, he

added reflectively, looking at the low discolored ceiling, what part the Negroes of this land would take in the

striving of the new century. He sketched in vague outline the new Industrial School that might rise among

these pines, he spoke in detail of the charitable and philanthropic work that might be organized, of money

that might be saved for banks and business. Finally he urged unity, and deprecated especially religious and

denomi national bickering. "Today," he said, with a smile, "the world cares little whether a man be Baptist

or Methodist, or indeed a churchman at all, so long as he is good and true. What difference does it make

whether a man be baptized in river or washbowl, or not at all? Let's leave all that littleness, and look higher."

Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly sat down. A painful hush seized that crowded mass. Little had they

understood of what he said, for he spoke an un known tongue, save the last word about baptism; that they

knew, and they sat very still while the clock ticked. Then at last a low suppressed snarl came from the Amen

corner, and an old bent man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straight up into the pulpit. He was

wrinkled and black, with scant gray and tufted hair; his voice and hands shook as with palsy; but on his face

lay the intense rapt look of the religious fanatic. He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands; twice he

raised it inarticulate, and then fairly burst into words, with rude and awful eloquence. He quivered, swayed,

and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild

shrieking arose from the corners where all the pentup feeling of the hour gathered itself and rushed into the

air. John never knew clearly what the old man said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing

denunciation for trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknow ingly he

had put rough, rude hands on something this little world held sacred. He arose silently, and passed out into

the night. Down toward the sea he went, in the fitful starlight, half conscious of the girl who followed timidly

after him. When at last he stood upon the bluff, he turned to his little sister and looked upon her sorrowfully,

remembering with sudden pain how little thought he had given her. He put his arm about her and let her

"John," she said, "does it make every oneunhappy when they study and learn lots of things?"

She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, "I wish I was unhappy,andand,"

It was several days later that John walked up to the Judge's house to ask for the privilege of teaching the

Negro school. The Judge himself met him at the front door, stared a little hard at him, and said brusquely,

"Go 'round to the kitchen door, John, and wait." Sitting on the kitchen steps, John stared at the corn,

thoroughly perplexed. What on earth had come over him? Every step he made offended some one. He had

come to save his people, and before he left the depot he had hurt them. He sought to teach them at the church,

and had outraged their deepest feelings. He had schooled himself to be respectful to the Judge, and then

blundered into his front door. And all the time he had meant right,and yet, and yet, somehow he found it so

hard and strange to fit his old surroundings again, to find his place in the world about him. He could not

remember that he used to have any diffi culty in the past, when life was glad and gay. The world seemed

smooth and easy then. Perhaps,but his sister came to the kitchen door just then and said the Judge awaited

The Judge sat in the diningroom amid his morning's mail, and he did not ask John to sit down. He plunged

squarely into the business. "You've come for the school, I suppose. Well John, I want to speak to you plainly.

You know I'm a friend to your people. I've helped you and your family, and would have done more if you

hadn't got the notion of going off. Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable

aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can

never expect to be the equal of white men. In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God

knows, I'll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry

white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we'll hold them under if we have to lynch every Nigger in

the land. Now, John, the question is, are you, with your education and Northern no tions, going to accept the

situation and teach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,I knew your father,

John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good Nigger. Wellwell, are you going to be like him, or are

you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks' heads, and make them discontented

"I am going to accept the situation, Judge Henderson," answered John, with a brevity that did not escape the

keen old man. He hesitated a moment, and then said shortly, "Very well,we'll try you awhile.

It was a full month after the opening of the Negro school that the other John came home, tall, gay, and

headstrong. The mother wept, the sisters sang. The whole white town was glad. A proud man was the Judge,

and it was a goodly sight to see the two swinging down Main Street together. And yet all did not go smoothly

between them, for the younger man could not and did not veil his contempt for the little town, and plainly had

his heart set on New York. Now the one cherished ambition of the Judge was to see his son mayor of

Altamaha, representative to the legislature, andwho could say?governor of Georgia. So the argument

often waxed hot between them. "Good heavens, father," the younger man would say after dinner, as he

lighted a cigar and stood by the fireplace, "you surely don't expect a young fellow like me to settle down

permanently in thisthis Godforgotten town with nothing but mud and Negroes?" "I did," the Judge would

answer laconically; and on this particular day it seemed from the gathering scowl that he was about to add

something more emphatic, but neighbors had already begun to drop in to admire his son, and the conversation

"Heah that John is livenin' things up at the darky school," volunteered the postmaster, after a pause.

"Oh, nothin' in particulah,just his almighty air and up pish ways. B'lieve I did heah somethin' about his

givin' talks on the French Revolution, equality, and such like. He's what I call a dangerous Nigger."

"Why, no,but Sally, our girl, told my wife a lot of rot. Then, too, I don't need to heah: a Nigger what won't

"Oh," said he, "it's the darky that tried to force himself into a seat beside the lady I was escorting"

But Judge Henderson waited to hear no more. He had been nettled all day, and now at this he rose with a

halfsmothered oath, took his hat and cane, and walked straight to the schoolhouse.

For John, it had been a long, hard pull to get things started in the rickety old shanty that sheltered his school.

The Ne groes were rent into factions for and against him, the parents were careless, the children irregular

and dirty, and books, pencils, and slates largely missing. Nevertheless, he struggled hopefully on, and seemed

to see at last some glimmering of dawn. The attendance was larger and the children were a shade cleaner this

week. Even the booby class in reading showed a little comforting progress. So John settled himself with

"Now, Mandy," he said cheerfully, "that's better; but you mustn't chop your words up so:

'Ifthemangoes.' Why, your little brother even wouldn't tell a story that way, now would he?"

The whole school started in surprise, and the teacher half arose, as the red, angry face of the Judge appeared

"John, this school is closed. You children can go home and get to work. The white people of Altamaha are

not spending their money on black folks to have their heads crammed with impudence and lies. Clear out! I'll

Up at the great pillared house the tall young son wandered aimlessly about after his father's abrupt departure.

In the house there was little to interest him; the books were old and stale, the local newspaper flat, and the

women had retired with headaches and sewing. He tried a nap, but it was too warm. So he sauntered out into

the fields, complaining dis consolately, "Good Lord! how long will this imprisonment last!" He was not a

bad fellow,just a little spoiled and selfindulgent, and as headstrong as his proud father. He seemed a

young man pleasant to look upon, as he sat on the great black stump at the edge of the pines idly swinging his

legs and smoking. "Why, there isn't even a girl worth getting up a respectable flirtation with," he growled.

Just then his eye caught a tall, willowy figure hurrying toward him on the narrow path. He looked with

interest at first, and then burst into a laugh as he said, "Well, I declare, if it isn't Jennie, the little brown

kitchenmaid! Why, I never noticed before what a trim little body she is. Hello, Jennie! Why, you haven't

kissed me since I came home," he said gaily. The young girl stared at him in surprise and

confusion,faltered something inarticulate, and attempted to pass. But a wilful mood had seized the young

idler, and he caught at her arm. Frightened, she slipped by; and half mischievously he turned and ran after her

Yonder, toward the sea, at the end of the path, came John slowly, with his head down. He had turned wearily

homeward from the schoolhouse; then, thinking to shield his mother from the blow, started to meet his sister

as she came from work and break the news of his dismissal to her. "I'll go away," he said slowly; "I'll go

away and find work, and send for them. I cannot live here longer." And then the fierce, buried anger surged

The great brown sea lay silent. The air scarce breathed. The dying day bathed the twisted oaks and mighty

pines in black and gold. There came from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky. There

was only a black man hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing neither sun nor sea, but starting as from a

dream at the frightened cry that woke the pines, to see his dark sister struggling in the arms of a tall and

He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struck him with all the pentup hatred of his great black arm,

and the body lay white and still beneath the pines, all bathed in sunshine and in blood. John looked at it

dreamily, then walked back to the house briskly, and said in a soft voice, "Mammy, I'm going awayI'm

He looked out where the North Star glistened pale above the waters, and said, "Yes, mammy, I'm

Then, without another word, he went out into the narrow lane, up by the straight pines, to the same winding

path, and seated himself on the great black stump, looking at the blood where the body had lain. Yonder in

the gray past he had played with that dead boy, romping together under the sol emn trees. The night

deepened; he thought of the boys at Johnstown. He wondered how Brown had turned out, and Carey? And

Jones,Jones? Why, he was Jones, and he wondered what they would all say when they knew, when they

knew, in that great long diningroom with its hundreds of merry eyes. Then as the sheen of the starlight stole

over him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of that vast concert hall, heard stealing toward him the faint sweet

music of the swan. Hark! was it music, or the hurry and shouting of men? Yes, surely! Clear and high the

faint sweet melody rose and fluttered like a living thing, so that the very earth trembled as with the tramp of

He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the strange melody, away from the dark shadows

where lay the noise of horses galloping, galloping on. With an effort he roused himself, bent forward, and

Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows dancing and heard their horses

thundering toward him, until at last they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front that haggard

whitehaired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied him,pitied him, and wondered if

he had the coiling twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his

They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days Sorrow Songsfor they were weary at heart.

And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird

old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred

me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me

and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs

towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks

were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of

wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the

human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by

fateful chance the Negro folksongthe rhythmic cry of the slavestands today not simply as the sole

American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been

neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and

misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the

Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the nation, but the songs were soon half

forgotten. Some, like "Near the lake where drooped the willow," passed into current airs and their source was

forgotten; others were caricatured on the "minstrel" stage and their memory died away. Then in wartime

came the singular Port Royal experi ment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first time the

North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the

Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and moulded less by the

world about them than any others outside the Black Belt. Their appear ance was uncouth, their language

funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power. Thomas Wentworth

Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare

beauty. But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so

There was once a blacksmith's son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the changes of time taught school in

Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and

finally served in the Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday school class of black

children in 1866, and sang with them and taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when

once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White, he knew his lifework was to let

those Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee

Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode,four halfclothed black boys and five girlwomen,led by a

man with a cause and a purpose. They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black

bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered

at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the

Congrega tional Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They came to New York and Henry Ward

Beecher dared to wel come them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his "Nigger Minstrels." So

their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland

and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty thousand

Since their day they have been imitatedsometimes well, by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes

ill, by straggling quartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled

the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real. But the true Negro

folksong still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro

What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase,

but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the

slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy.

I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can

gainsay the hearttouching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children

of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty

The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can

trace here and there signs of development. My grandfather's grand mother was seized by an evil Dutch

trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she

shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen

Do bana coba, gene me, gene me! Do bana coba, gene me, gene me! Ben d' nuli, nuli, nuli,

The child sang it to his children and they to their children's children, and so two hundred years it has travelled

down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but

This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the strange chant which heralds "The

Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of melodysongs of undoubted Negro origin

and wide popular currency, and songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have just

mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." When, struck

with a sudden poverty, the United States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a

brigadiergeneral went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirts of the

throng began singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.

The third song is the cradlesong of death which all men know,"Swing low, sweet chariot,"whose bars

begin the life story of "Alexander Crummell." Then there is the song of many waters, "Roll, Jordan, roll," a

mighty chorus with minor cadences. There were many songs of the fugitive like that which opens "The

Wings of Atalanta," and the more familiar "Been alistening." The seventh is the song of the End and the

Beginning"My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fall"; a strain of this is placed before "The

Dawn of Freedom." The song of groping"My way's cloudy"begins "The Meaning of Progress"; the

ninth is the song of this chapter"Wrestlin' Jacob, the day is abreaking,"a paean of hopeful strife. The

last master song is the song of songs"Steal away,"sprung from "The Faith of the Fathers."

There are many others of the Negro folksongs as striking and characteristic as these, as, for instance, the

three strains in the third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selection on

more scientific principles. There are, too, songs that seem to be a step removed from the more primitive

types: there is the mazelike medley, "Bright sparkles," one phrase of which heads "The Black Belt"; the

Easter carol, "Dust, dust and ashes"; the dirge, "My moth er's took her flight and gone home"; and that burst

of melody hovering over "The Passing of the FirstBorn""I hope my mother will be there in that beautiful

These represent a third step in the development of the slave song, of which "You may bury me in the East" is

the first, and songs like "March on" (chapter six) and "Steal away" are the second. The first is African music,

the second Afro American, while the third is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster

land. The result is still distinc tively Negro and the method of blending original, but the elements are both

Negro and Caucasian. One might go further and find a fourth step in this development, where the songs of

white America have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole phrases of

Negro melody, as "Swanee River" and "Old Black Joe." Side by side, too, with the growth has gone the

debasements and imitations the Negro "minstrel" songs, many of the "gospel" hymns, and some of the

contemporary "coon" songs,a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never find

In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half

articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology

have displaced the older senti ment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an un known tongue, as

the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to

music of singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were

turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, and the

music less often caught. Of nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master

songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward

The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real

poetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the

slave stood near to Nature's heart. Life was a "rough and rolling sea" like the brown Atlantic of the Sea

Islands; the "Wilderness" was the home of God, and the "lonesome valley" led to the way of life. "Winter'll

soon be over," was the picture of life and death to a tropical imagination. The sudden wild thunder storms of

the South awed and impressed the Negroes,at times the rumbling seemed to them "mournful," at times

The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words. One sees the ploughmen in the hot, moist

Yet the soulhunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in

Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so

that we get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omis sions and silences. Mother and

child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affec tion, but there is little

of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange

Elsewhere comes the cry of the "motherless" and the "Farewell, farewell, my only child."

Lovesongs are scarce and fall into two categoriesthe frivolous and light, and the sad. Of deep successful

love there is ominous silence, and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and meaning:

Poor Rosy, poor gal; Poor Rosy, poor gal; Rosy break my poor heart, Heav'n shallabe my home.

A black woman said of the song, "It can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled sperrit." The same voice

Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the

waters, perhapswho knows?back to his ancient forests again. Later days transfigured his fatalism, and

The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo characteristic change when they enter the

mouth of the slave. Especially is this true of Bible phrases. "Weep, O captive daughter of Zion," is quaintly

turned into "Zion, weepalow," and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic dreaming of

As in olden time, the words of these hymns were impro vised by some leading minstrel of the religious

band. The circumstances of the gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of allowable

thought, confined the poetry for the most part to single or double lines, and they seldom were expanded to

quatrains or longer tales, although there are some few examples of sustained efforts, chiefly paraphrases of

the Bible. Three short series of verses have always attracted me,the one that heads this chapter, of one line

of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, "Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and

suffered was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plain tively." The second and third are descriptions

of the Last Judgment,the one a late improvisation, with some traces of outside influence:

Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hopea faith in the ultimate justice of things.

The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confi dence. Sometimes it is faith in life,

sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But

whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls

and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races

of today are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of

peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption,

easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago

such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So

wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and

"slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores

of science. Why should AEschylus have sung two thousand years before Shake speare was born? Why has

civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands

meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by

denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three

gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and songsoft, stirring melody in an illharmonized and

unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the

foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it;

the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of

the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood,

prayer and sacri fice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the

God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the

very warp and woof of this nation,we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with

theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice,

Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have

been given to this nation in bloodbrotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and

Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of

things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the

Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high

windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar

belowswelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my little

And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his way.

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not stillborn into the world wilderness.

Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest

wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness

which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good

time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed