The Negro Digs Up His Past
By ARTHUR A. SCHOMBURG
G r a d u a l l y as the study of the Negro’s past has come out
> H E American N e g r o must remake his past
in order to make his f u t u r e . T h o u g h it is of the vagaries of rhetoric and propaganda and become sysorthodox to think of America as the one tematic and scientific, three outstanding conclusions have
country where it is unnecessary to have a been established:
First, that the N e g r o has been throughout the centuries of
past, w h a t is a l u x u r y f o r the nation as a
whole becomes a prime social necessity for controversy an active collaborator, and o f t e n a pioneer, in the
the Negro. F o r him, a group tradition must supply com- struggle for his o w n freedom and advancement. T h i s is
pensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote true to a degree which makes it the more surprising that it
f o r prejudice. History must restore w h a t slavery took away, has not been recognized earlier.
Second, that by virtue of their being regarded as somef o r it is the social damage of slavery t h a t the present generations must repair and offset. So among the rising demo- thing “exceptional,” even by friends and well-wishers,
cratic millions we find the N e g r o thinking more collectively, Negroes of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassomore retrospectively than the rest, and apt out of the very ciated f r o m the group, and group credit lost accordingly.
pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiT h i r d , that the remote racial origins of the Negro, f a r
quarian of t h e m all.
f r o m being w h a t the race and the w o r l d have been given to
Vindicating evidences of individual achievement have as understand, offer a record of creditable group achievement
a matter of fact been gathered and treasured for over a when scientifically viewed, and more important still, t h a t
c e n t u r y : Abbe Gregoire’s liberal-minded book on Negro they are of vital “general interest because of their bearing
upon the beginnings and early development of culture.
notables in 1808 was the pioneer e f f o r t ; it has been followed
W i t h such crucial t r u t h s to document and establish, an
at intervals by less-known and. o f t e n less discriminating comounce of fact is w o r t h a pound of controversy.
So the
pendiums of exceptional men and women of A f r i c a n stock,
B u t this sort of thing was on the whole pathetically over- N e g r o historian today digs u n d e r the spot where his precorrective, ridiculously over-laudatory; it was apologetics decessor stood and argued. N o t long ago, the Public Library
turned into biography. A true historical sense develops of H a r l e m housed a special exhibition of books, pamphlets,
slowly and with difficulty under such circumstances. B u t prints and old engravings, that simply said, to sceptic and
today, even if for the ultimate purpose of group justifica- believer alike, to scholar and school-child, to proud black and
tion, history has become less a matter of argument and more astonished white, ” H e r e is the evidence.” Assembled f r o m
a m a t t e r of record. T h e r e is the definite desire and deter- the rapidly growing collections of the leading Negro bookmination to have a history, well documented, widely known collectors and research societies, there were in these cases,
materials not only f o r the first true
at least within race circles, and ad. :
w r i t i n g of N e g r o history, but for
ministered as a stimulating and in:
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progressive group organization, and pioneer social reform
670
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scholarship,
THE
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NEGRO DIGS UP HIS
ican history. Slow though it be, historical t r u t h is no exception to the proverb.
H e r e among the rarities of early N e g r o Americana was
J u p i t e r H a m m o n ‘ s Address to the Negroes of the State of
N e w York, edition of 1787, with the first American Negro
poet’s famous “If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall
find nobody to reproach us f o r being black, or for being
slaves.” H e r e was Phillis W h e a t l e y ‘ s Mss. poem of 1767 addressed to the students of H a r v a r d , her spirited encomiums
upon George W a s h i n g t o n and the Revolutionary Cause,
and. J o h n M a r r a n t ‘ s St. J o h n ‘ s D a y eulogy to the ‘Brothers
of A f r i c a n Lodge N o . 459′ delivered at Boston in 1784.
H e r e too were Lemuel Haynes’ Vermont commentaries on
the American Revolution and his learned sermons to his
white congregation in R u t l a n d , Vermont, and the sermons
of the year 1808 by the Rev. Absalom Jones of St. T h o m a s
Church, Philadelphia, and P e t e r W i l l i a m s of St. Philip’s,
N e w Y o r k , pioneer Episcopal rectors w h o spoke out in
daring and influential ways on the Abolition of the Slave
T r a d e . Such things and many others are more than mere
items of curiosity: they educate any receptive mind.
Reinforcing these were still r a r e r items of Africana and
foreign N e g r o interest, the volumes of J u a n Latino, the best
Latinist of Spain in the reign of Philip V , incumbent pf the
chair of Poetry at the University of G r a n a d a , and author
of Poems printed G r a n a t a e 1573 and a book on the Escurial
published 1576; the L a t i n and D u t c h treatises of Jacobus
Eliza Capitein, a native of W e s t Coast A f r i c a and graduate
of the University of Leyden, Gustavus Vassa’s celebrated
autobiography that supplied so much of the evidence in 1796
f o r Granville Sharpe’s attack on slavery in the British colonies, Julien R a y m o n d ‘ s P a r i s expose of the disabilities of
the free people of color in the then ( 1 7 9 1 ) French colony
of Hayti, and Baron de Vastey’s C r y of the Fatherland,
the famous polemic by the secretary of Christophe that precipitated the H a y t i a n struggle f o r independence.
The
cumulative effect of such evidences of scholarship and moral
prowess is too weighty to be dismissed as exceptional.
t- B u t weightier surely than any
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evidence of individual talent and
scholarship could ever be, is the evidence of important
collaboration and significant pioneer initiative in social service and reform, in the efforts t o w a r d race emancipation, colonization and race betterment. F r o m neglected
and rust-spotted pages comes testimony to the black«men and
women who stood shoulder to shoulder in courage and zeal,
and o f t e n on a parity of intelligence and public talent,
with their notable white benefactors. T h e r e was the already
cited w o r k of Vassa that aided so materially the efforts of
Granville Sharpe, the record of P a u l Cuffee, the Negro “colonization pioneer, associated so importantly with the establishment of Sierra Leone as a British colony f o r the occupancy
of f r e e people of color in W e s t A f r i c a ; the dramatic and
history-making expose of J o h n Baptist Phillips, African
graduate of Edinburgh, w h o compelled through Lord Bathh u r s t in 1824 the enforcement of the articles of capitulation
guaranteeing freedom to the blacks of T r i n i d a d . T h e r e is
the record of the pioneer colonization project of Rev. Daniel
Coker in conducting a voyage of ninety expatriates to W e s t
A f r i c a in 1820, of the missionary efforts of Samuel C r o w t h e r
in Sierra Leone, first Anglican bishop of his diocese, and that
of the w o r k of J o h n Russwurm, a leader in the work and
foundation of the American Colonization Society.
W h e n we consider the facts, certain chapters of American
history will have to be reopened. J u s t as black men were influential factors in the campaign against the slave trade, so
they were among the earliest instigators of the abolition
movement. Indeed there was a dangerous calm between the
agitation for the suppression of the slave trade and the
beginning of the campaign for emancipation. D u r i n g that interval colored men were very influential in arousing the attention of public men who in turn aroused the conscience of
the country. Continuously between 1808 and 1845, men like
Prince Saunders, P e t e r Williams, Absalom Jones, Nathaniel
Paul, and Bishops Varick and Richard Allen, the founders
of the t w o wings of A f r i c a n Methodism, spoke out with
force and initiative, and men like D e n m a r k Vesey ( 1 8 2 2 ) ,
David W a l k e r ( 1 8 2 8 ) and N a t
—
T u r n e r ( 1 8 3 1 ) advocated and organized schemes for direct action.
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Marrant’s Sermon to the first
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Crummell’s
early plea for higher
education:
“Provide you manlier diet”
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The ex-slave turned emancipator:
a not unusual role
672
THE
N E G R O DIGS UP HIS
ally ignored but important conventions of Free People
of Color in N e w ‘ York, Philadelphia and other centers,
whose platforms and efforts are to the N e g r o of as great
significance as the nationally cherished memories of Faneuil
and Independence : Hall^. . T h e n w i t h Abolition comes
the better documented and more recognized collaboration
of Samuel R. W a r d , W i l l i a m W e l l s B r o w n , H e n r y Highland Garnett,- M a r t i n Delaney, H a r r i e t T u b m a n , Sojourner
T r u t h , and Frederick Douglass with their great colleagues,
T a p p a n , Phillips, Sumner, M o t t , Stowe and Garrison.
But even this latter group who came within the limelight
of national and international notice, and thus into open comparison with the best minds of their generation, the public
too often regards as a group, of inspired illiterates, eloquent
echoes of their Abolitionist sponsors. F o r a true estimate of
their ability and scholarship, however, one must go with the
antiquarian to the files of the Anglo-African Magazine, where
page by page comparisons may be made. T h e i r writings show
Douglass, M c C u n e Smith, W e l l s B r o w n , Delaney, W i l mot Blyden and Alexander C r u m m e l l to have been as scholarly and versatile as any of ; the noted publicists with whom
they vyere associated. All of them labored internationally
in the cause.of their fellows; to Scotland, England, France,
G e r m a n y and Africa, they carried their brilliant offensive of
debate and propaganda, and with this came instance upon
instance of signal foreign recognition, f r o m academic, scientific, public and official sources.
Delaney’s Principia of
Ethnology won public reception f r o m learned societies, Penington’s discourses an honorary doctorate f r o m Heidelberg,
W e l l s B r o w n ‘ s three’ years mission the entree of the salons
of London and Paris, and Douglass’ tours.receptions second
enly to H e n r y W a r d Beecher’s.
A f t e r this great eta of, public interest and discussion, it
was Alexander Crummell, who, with the reaction already
setting in, first organized Negro brains defensively through
the founding of the American N e g r o Academy in 1874 at
W a s h i n g t o n . A N e w York boy whose zeal for education
had suffered a rude shock when refused admission to the
Episcopal Seminary by Bishop O n d e r d o n k , he had been befriended by J o h n J a y and sent to Cambridge University,
E n g l a n d , for his education and ordination. O n his return,
he was beset with the, idea of promoting race scholarship,
and the Academy was the final result. I t has continued
ever since to be one of the bulwarks of our intellectual life,
though u n f o r t u n a t e l y its members have had to spend too
much of their energy and effort answering detractors and disproving popular fallacies. O n l y gradually have the men of
this group been able to work toward pure scholarship. T a k ing a slightly different start, T h e N e g r o Society for Historical Research was later organized in N e w York, and has
succeeded in stimulating the collection f r o m all parts of the
world of books and documents dealing with the Negro. I t
has also brought together for the first time cooperatively in
a single society African, W e s t Indian and Afro-American
scholars. Direct offshoots of this same effort are the extensive private collections of H e n r y P . Slaughter of Washington, the Rev. Charles D . M a r t i n of H a r l e m , of A r t h u r
Schomburg of Brooklyn, and of the late J o h n E . Bruce, who
was the enthusiastic and far-seeing pioneer of this movement.
Finally and more recently, the Association for the Study of
N e g r o L i f e and History has extended these efforts into a
scientific research project of great achievement and promise.
U n d e r the direction of D r . C a r t e r G . W o o d s o n , it has con-
PAST
tinuously maintained for nine years the publication of the
learned quarterly, T h e J o u r n a l of N e g r o History, and with
the assistance and recognition of two large educational foundations has maintained research and published valuable
monographs in N e g r o history. Almost keeping pace with the
work of scholarship has been the effort to popularize the results, and to place before N e g r o youth in the schools the true
story of race vicissitude, struggle and accomplishment. So
that quite largely now the ambition of N e g r o youth can be
nourished on its own milk.
Such work is a far cry f r o m the puerile controversy and
petty braggadocio with which the effort for race history
first started. But a general as well as a racial lesson has
been learned. W e seem lately to have come at last to realize
what the truly scientific attitude requires, and to see that the
race issue has been a plague on both our historical houses, and
that history cannot be properly written with either bias or
counter-bias.
T h e blatant Caucasian racialist with his
theories and assumptions of race superiority and dominance
has in turn bred his Ethiopian c o u n t e r p a r t — t h e rash and
rabid amateur who has glibly tried to prove half of the
world’s geniuses to have been Negroes and to trace the pedigree of nineteenth century Americans from the Queen of
Sheba. But fortunately today there is on both sides of a
really common cause less of the sand of controversy and more
of the dust of digging.
Of course, a racial motive remains—legitimately compatible with scientific method and aim. T h e work our race
students now regard as important, they undertake very
naturally to overcome in part certain handicaps of disparagement and omission too well-known to particularize.
But
they do so not merely that we may not w r o n g f u l l y be deprived of the spiritual nourishment of our cultural past, but
also that the full story of h u m a n collaboration and interdependence may be told and realized. Especially is this likely
to be the effect of the latest and most fascinating of all of
the attempts to open up the closed’ Negro past, namely the
important study of A f r i c a n cultural origins and sources. T h e
bigotry of civilization which is the taproot of intellectual
prejudice begins f a r back and must be corrected at its source.
Fundamentally it has come about f r o m that depreciation of
Africa which has sprung up f r o m ignorance of her true role
and position in h u m a n history and the early development
of culture. T h e N e g r o has been a man without a history
because he has been considered a man without a w o r t h y culture. B u t a new notion of the cultural attainment and
potentialities of the A f r i c a n stocks has recently come about,
partly through the corrective influence of the more scientific
study of A f r i c a n institutions and early cultural history,
partly through g r o w i n g appreciation of the skill and beauty
and in many cases the historical priority of the A f r i c a n native
crafts, and finally through the signal recognition which first
in France and G e r m a n y , but now very generally the astonishing art of the A f r i c a n sculptures has received. Into these
fascinating new vistas, with limited horizons lifting in all
directions, the mind of the N e g r o has leapt f o r w a r d faster
than the slow clearings of scholarship will yet safely permit.
B u t there is no doubt that here is a field f u l l of the most intriguing and inspiring possibilities. Already the N e g r o sees
himself against a reclaimed background, in a perspective that
will give pride and self-respect ample scope, and make
history yield f o r him the same values that the treasured past
of any people affords.
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The Art of the Ancestors
F
ROM one of the best extant collections of African art, that of the
Barnes Foundation of Merion, Pennsylvania, come these exemplars
of the art of the ancestors. Primitive African wood and bronze
sculpture is now universally recognized as “a notable instance of plastic
representation.” Long after it was known as ethnological material, it
was artistically “discovered” and has exerted an important influence
upon modernist art, both in France and Germany. Attested influences
are to be found in the work of Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Archipenko, Lipschitz, Lembruch and others, and in Paris centering around
Paul Guillaume, one of its pioneer exponents, a coterie profoundly
influenced by the aesthetic of this art has developed.
Masterful over its material, in a powerful simplicity of conception, design and effect, it is evidence of an aesthetic endowment of the highest order. The Negro in his American environment has turned predominantly to the arts of music, the dance, and poetry, an emphasis
quite different from that of African culture. But beyond this as evidence of a fundamental artistic bent and versatility, there comes from
the consideration of this ancient plastic art another modern and
practical possibility and hope, that it may exert upon the artistic development of the American Negro the influence that it has already
had upon modern European artists. It may very well be taken as the
basis for a characteristic school of expression in the plastic and pictorial
arts, and give to us again a renewed mastery of them, a mine of fresh
motifs, and a lesson in simplicity and originality of expression. Surely this art, once known and appreciated, can scarcely have less influence upon the blood descendants than upon those who inherit by
tradition only. And at the very least, even for those not especially
interested in art, it should definitely establish the enlightening fact that
the Negro is not a cultural foundling without an inheritance.
A. L.
Soudan-Niger
Baoule
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and the day in which we live. Black youth seems to be asking for what Woodson wanted as he expressed it in these
pages. His philosophy was not only sound for him but it is sound for them, as they make the same demands of
administrators for Black Studies, Black Curricula and Black personnel. It is for this reason that we publish this
volume. It had a message for Yesterday and it has a message which Black and white should know for Today.
Charles H. Wesley and Thelma D. Perry
Foreword
THE thoughts brought together in this volume have been expressed in recent addresses and articles written by the
author. From time to time persons deeply interested in the point of view therein presented have requested that these
comments on education be made available in book form. To supply this demand this volume is given to the public.
In the preparation of the volume the author has not followed in detail the productions upon which most of the book is
based. The aim is to set forth only the thought developed in passing from the one to the other. The language in some
cases, then, is entirely new; and the work is not a collection of essays. In this way repetition has been avoided except
to emphasize the thesis which the author sustains.
Carter Godwin Woodson Washington, D. C.
January, 1933.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
v
FOREWORD
xxv
Preface
xxix
CHAPTER
PAGE
I.
THE SEAT OF THE TROUBLE
1
II.
HOW WE MISSED THE MARK
9
III.
HOW WE DRIFTED AWAY FROM THE TRUTH
17
IV.
EDUCATION UNDER OUTSIDE CONTROL
26
V.
THE FAILURE TO LEARN TO MAKE A LIVING
38
VI.
THE EDUCATED NEGRO LEAVES THE MASSES
52
VII.
DISSENSION AND WEAKNESS
62
VIII.
PROFESSIONAL EDUCATED DISCOURAGED
74
IX.
POLITICAL EDUCATION NEGLECTED
83
X.
THE LOSS OF VISION
96
XI.
THE NEED FOR SERVICE RATHER THAN LEADERSHIP
111
XII.
HIRELINGS IN THE PLACES OF PUBLIC SERVANTS
120
XIII.
UNDERSTAND THE NEGRO
132
XIV.
THE NEW PROGRAM
144
XV.
VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE
157
XVI.
THE NEW TYPE OF PROFESSIONAL MAN REQUIRED
173
XVII.
HIGHER STRIVINGS IN THE SERVICE OF THE COUNTRY 181
XVIII.
THE STUDY OF THE NEGRO
190
APPENDIX
199
INDEX
207
Preface
HEREIN are recorded not opinions but the reflections of one who for forty years has participated in the education of
the black, brown, yellow and white races in both hemispheres and in tropical and temperate regions. Such experience,
too, has been with students in all grades from the kindergarten to the university. The author, moreover, has traveled
around the world to observe not only modern school systems in various countries but to study the special systems set
up by private agencies and governments to educate the natives in their colonies and dependencies. Some of these
observations, too, have been checked against more recent studies on a later tour.
Discussing herein the mistakes made in the education of the Negro, the writer frankly admits that he has committed
some of these errors himself. In several chapters, moreover, he specifically points out wherein he himself has strayed
from the path of wisdom. This book, then, is not intended as a broadside against any particular person or class, but it is
given as a corrective for methods which have not produced satisfactory results.
The author does not support the once popular view that in matters of education Negroes are rightfully subjected to the
will of others on the presumption that these poor people are not large taxpayers and must be content with charitable
contributions to their uplift. The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual
of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity make the most of himself. Such opportunity, too, should not
be determined from without by forces set to direct the proscribed element in a way to redound solely to the good of
others but should be determined by the make-up of the Negro himself and by what his environment requires of him.
This new program of uplift, the author contends, should not be decided upon by the trial and error method in the
application of devices used in dealing with others in a different situation and at another epoch. Only by careful study
of the Negro himself and the life which he is forced to lead can we arrive at the proper procedure in this crisis. The
mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must result in making a man think and do
for himself just as the Jews have done in spite of universal persecution.
In thus estimating the results obtained from the so-called education of the Negro the author does not go to the census
figures to show the progress of the race. It may be of no importance to the race to be able to boast today of many times
as many “educated” members as it had in 1865. If they are of the wrong kind the increase in numbers will be a
disadvantage rather than an advantage. The only question which concerns us here is whether these “educated” persons
are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating
the regime of the oppressor.
Herein, however, lies no argument for the oft-heard contention that education for the white man should mean one thing
and for the Negro a different thing. The element of race does not enter here. It is merely a matter of exercising
common sense in approaching people through their environment in order to deal with conditions as they are rather than
as you would like to see them or imagine that they are. There may be a difference in method of attack, but the principle
remains the same.
“Highly educated” Negroes denounce persons who advocate for the Negro a sort of education different in some
respects from that now given the white man. Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities
for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination. They are anxious to have everything
the white man has even if it is harmful. The possibility of originality in the Negro, therefore, is discounted one hundred
per cent to maintain a nominal equality. If the whites decide to take up Mormonism the Negroes must follow their
lead. If the whites neglect such a study, then the Negroes must do likewise.
The author, however, does not have such an attitude. He considers the educational system as it has developed both in
Europe and America an antiquated process which does not hit the mark even in the case of the needs of the white man
himself. If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and
carry out a program of his own.
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro,
because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.
For example, the philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage,
segregation, and lynching. The oppressor has the right to exploit, to handicap, and to kill the oppressed. Negroes daily
educated in the tenets of such a religion of the strong have accepted the status of the weak as divinely ordained, and
during the last three generations of their nominal freedom they have done practically nothing to change it. Their
pouting and resolutions indulged in by a few of the race have been of little avail.
No systematic effort toward change has been possible, for, taught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature
and religion which have established the present code of morals, the Negro’s mind has been brought under the control
of his oppressor. The problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved. When you control a man’s
thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He
will find his “proper place” and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being
told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.
The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and
has accomplished everything worth while, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by
making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples.
The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race.
The difficulty is that the “educated Negro” is compelled to live and move among his own people whom he has been
taught to despise. As a rule, therefore, the “educated Negro” prefers to buy his food from a white grocer because he
has been taught that the Negro is not clean. It does not matter how often a Negro washes his hands, then, he cannot
clean them, and it does not matter how often a white man uses his hands he cannot soil them. The educated Negro,
moreover, is disinclined to take part in Negro business, because he has been taught in economics that Negroes cannot
operate in this particular sphere. The “educated Negro” gets less and less pleasure out of the Negro church, not on
account of its primitiveness and increasing corruption, but because of his preference for the seats of “righteousness”
controlled by his oppressor. This has been his education, and nothing else can be expected of him.
If the “educated Negro” could go off and be white he might be happy, but only a mulatto now and then can do this.
The large majority of this class, then, must go through life denouncing white people because they are trying to run
away from the blacks and decrying the blacks because they are not white.
Chapter I: The Seat of the Trouble
THE “educated Negroes” have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in
their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the
African. Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of
Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and
universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence.
For example, an officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there,
called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy of the faculty to offer such work. He promptly informed the officer that he
knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way. He went to be educated in a system
which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity.
At a Negro summer school two years ago, a white instructor gave a course on the Negro, using for his text a work
which teaches that whites are superior to the blacks. When asked by one of the students why he used such a textbook
the instructor replied that he wanted them to get that point of view. Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where
they must be convinced of their inferiority.
The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book
he studies. If he happens to leave school after he masters the fundamentals, before he finishes high school or reaches
college, he will naturally escape some of this bias and may recover in time to be of service to his people.
Practically all of the successful Negroes in this country are of the uneducated type or of that of Negroes who have had
no formal education at all. The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best
colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people. If after leaving school they have the opportunity to
give out to Negroes what traducers of the race would like to have it learn such persons may thereby earn a living at
teaching or preaching what they have been taught but they never become a constructive force in the development of
the race. The so-called school, then, becomes a questionable factor in the life of this despised people.
As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to
change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one’s aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage
and crime. It is strange, then, that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom have not risen up against the
present propaganda in the schools and crushed it. This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching
movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom. Why not exploit, enslave, or
exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?
To be more explicit we may go to the seat of the trouble. Our most widely known scholars have been trained in
universities outside of the South. Northern and Western institutions, however, have had no time to deal with matters
which concern the Negro especially. They must direct their attention to the problems of the majority of their
constituents, and too often they have stimulated their prejudices by referring to the Negro as unworthy of
consideration. Most of what these universities have offered as language, mathematics, and science may have served a
good purpose, but much of what they have taught as economics, history, literature, religion and philosophy is
propaganda and cant that involved a waste of time and misdirected the Negroes thus trained.
And even in the certitude of science or mathematics it has been unfortunate that the approach to the Negro has been
borrowed from a “foreign” method. For example, the teaching of arithmetic in the fifth grade in a backward county in
Mississippi should mean one thing in the Negro school and a decidedly different thing in the white school. The Negro
children, as a rule, come from the homes of tenants and peons who have to migrate annually from plantation to
plantation, looking for light which they have never seen. The children from the homes of white planters and merchants
live permanently in the midst of calculations, family budgets, and the like, which enable them sometimes to learn more
by contact than the Negro can acquire in school. Instead of teaching such Negro children less arithmetic, they should
be taught much more of it than the white children, for the latter attend a graded school consolidated by free
transportation when the Negroes go to one-room rented hovels to be taught without equipment and by incompetent
teachers educated scarcely beyond the eighth grade.
In schools of theology Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified
segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro sometimes almost to the point of starvation.
Deriving their sense of right from this teaching, graduates of such schools can have no message to grip the people
whom they have been ill trained to serve. Most of such mis-educated ministers, therefore, preach to benches while
illiterate Negro preachers do the best they can in supplying the spiritual needs of the masses.
In the schools of business administration Negroes are trained exclusively in the psychology and economics of Wall
Street and are, therefore, made to despise the opportunities to run ice wagons, push banana carts, and sell peanuts
among their own people. Foreigners, who have not studied economics but have studied Negroes, take up this business
and grow rich.
In schools of journalism Negroes are being taught how to edit such metropolitan dailies as the Chicago Tribune and
theNew York Times, which would hardly hire a Negro as a janitor; and when these graduates come to the Negro
weeklies for employment they are not prepared to function in such establishments, which, to be successful, must be
built upon accurate knowledge of the psychology and philosophy of the Negro.
When a Negro has finished his education in our schools, then, he has been equipped to begin the life of an
Americanized or Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his
teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his
disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain. He goes forth to play his part in life, but he must be both social
and bisocial at the same time. While he is a part of the body politic, he is in addition to this a member of a particular
race to which he must restrict himself in all matters social. While serving his country he must serve within a special
group. While being a good American, he must above all things be a “good Negro”; and to perform this definite
function he must learn to stay in a “Negro’s place.”
For the arduous task of serving a race thus handicapped, however, the Negro graduate has had little or no training at
all. The people whom he has been ordered to serve have been belittled by his teachers to the extent that he can hardly
find delight in undertaking what his education has led him to think is impossible. Considering his race as blank in
achievement, then, he sets out to stimulate their imitation of others The performance is kept up a while; but, like any
other effort at meaningless imitation, it results in failure.
Facing this undesirable result, the highly educated Negro often grows sour. He becomes too pessimistic to be a
constructive force and usually develops into a chronic fault-finder or a complainant at the bar of public opinion. Often
when he sees that the fault lies at the door of the white oppressor whom he is afraid to attack, he turns upon the
pioneering Negro who is at work doing the best he can to extricate himself from an uncomfortable predicament.
In this effort to imitate, however, these “educated people” are sincere. They hope to make the Negro conform quickly
to the standard of the whites and thus remove the pretext for the barriers between the races. They do not realize,
however, that even if the Negroes do successfully imitate the whites, nothing new has thereby been accomplished. You
simply have a larger number of persons doing what others have been doing. The unusual gifts of the race have not
thereby been developed, and an unwilling world, therefore, continues to wonder what the Negro is good for.
These “educated” people, however, decry any such thing as race consciousness; and in some respects they are right.
They do not like to hear such expressions as “Negro literature,” “Negro poetry,” “African art,” or “thinking black”; and,
roughly speaking, we must concede that such things do not exist. These things did not figure in the courses which they
pursued in school, and why should they? “Aren’t we all Americans? Then, whatever is American is as much the
heritage of the Negro as of any other group in this country.”
The “highly educated” contend, moreover, that when the Negro emphasizes these things he invites racial discrimination
by recognizing such differentness of the races. The thought that the Negro is one thing and the white man another is the
stock-in-trade argument of the Caucasian to justify segregation. Why, then, should the Negro blame the white man for
doing what he himself does?
These “highly educated” Negroes, however, fail to see that it is not the Negro who takes this position. The white man
forces him to it, and to extricate himself therefrom the Negro leader must so deal with the situation as to develop in
the segregated group the power with which they can elevate themselves. The differentness of races, moreover, is no
evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not
possess. It is by the development of these gifts that every race must justify its right to exist.
Chapter II: How We Missed the Mark
How we have arrived at the present state of affairs can be understood only by studying the forces effective in the
development of Negro education since it was systematically undertaken immediately after Emancipation. To point out
merely the defects as they appear today will be of little benefit to the present and future generations. These things
must be viewed in their historic setting. The conditions of today have been determined by what has taken place in the
past, and in a careful study of this history we may see more clearly the great theatre of events in which the Negro has
played a part. We may understand better what his rôle has been and how well he has functioned in it.
The idea of educating the Negroes after the Civil War was largely a prompting of philanthropy. Their white neighbors
failed to assume this responsibility. These black people had been liberated as a result of a sectional conflict out of
which their former owners had emerged as victims. From this class, then, the freedmen could not expect much
sympathy or cooperation in the effort to prepare themselves to figure as citizens of a modern republic.
From functionaries of the United States Government itself and from those who participated in the conquest of the
secessionists early came the plan of teaching these freedmen the simple duties of life as worked out by the Freedmen’s
Bureau and philanthropic agencies. When systematized this effort became a program for the organization of churches
and schools and the direction of them along lines which had been considered most conducive to the progress of people
otherwise circumstanced. Here and there some variation was made in this program in view of the fact that the status of
the freedmen in no way paralleled that of their friends and teachers, but such thought was not general. When the
Negroes in some way would learn to perform the duties which other elements of the population had prepared
Author: Booker T. Washington
(c.1856-1915)
Title: from Up from Slavery,
Chapter 14: The Atlanta
Exposition Address
Year: 1901
Genre: Short Story
Big Idea: Portraits of Real Life
Grade: 10
Country: USA
Glencoe Literature Classics CD-ROM

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