In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [81], Lines —— 0.15 —— Norm PgEn [81], VI Service and Coöperation If I were asked what the mass of the Negroes most need that we should give them, I think only one answer could be given which would go to the root of the whole matter. And that deepest need is not at all a Negro need, but a human one: we ourselves, as a people, share it profoundly. They need ideals. The lives of so many of them seem just a chaos of wants, so that one stands at first dumb with bewilderment: so many fundamental needs, so much emptiness where there must be solid foundations if anything worth while is built up! But that which will open a way to fill all these empty spaces is a vision of something higher in their own souls; something higher, yet not too far or cold to kindle a spark of desire in their hearts, to quicken them, by vision and aspiration. If we look back over the last fifty years we will see, perhaps, how little of this foremost essential of human advance we have furnished for them. Some things we have done, I know. We have paid millions for their education in the public schools: but have we cared how it was spent? The superintendent of education in one of our states, in a recent report, pronounces the Negro public schools of that commonwealth utterly inefficient. He charges their wretched failure on the white county superintendents, many of whom, he says, never go near the Negro schools under them, nor concern themselves with the selection of fit teachers, nor with their improvement after they are selected. This story would fit more states than one. We could squander ten times the millions already spent in education like that without creating a single impulse towards better things: there is never any vivifying power in indifference. Yet, our public schools for Negroes have done good—a world of it. Some of this must be credited to those among us who have honestly sought the Negro ’s good. The rest, I think, is due to the Negroes themselves, and to those 82 in black and white 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [82], Lines —— 0.0p —— Shor PgEn [82], once-so-hated “Yankees” who first made possible to Negro teachers a suitable preparation for their work. Love is the world’s lifting-force. It is like the light, which yearly lifts untold tons of cold, dead matter to the tree-tops in the beauty of green leaves. When we see leaves we know light has been at work: nothing else could lift matter up there so that leaves could be. And wherever we find a trace of spiritual quickening , a budding of dormant life, however scant, we know by the same token that Love has been at work: there is no other force which produces that effect. The uplift of the Negroes through the public schools, small as it is compared with what it might have been with the same expenditure of money, has chiefly come, not from our sometimes grudging provision, but from ideals kindled in some Negroes’ souls by love and sacrifice other than our own. The Northerners who came down here to teach the Negroes were ignorant of our past, of our conditions, of the underlying causes of our new antagonism to the Negroes—of all the circle of white life which looked to them so inexplicably cruel and wrong. They were only less ignorant about the Negroes, their traditions , their stage of race-growth, their true relation to Southern life. Few people had learned to be world-dwellers then; and these eager Northern folks, who saw a need and longed to meet it, translated neither white life nor black in worldterms . They made blunders, of course; and a good many Negroes acquired some knowledge at the expense of more wisdom. We have all seen white people do the same thing. And certainly the South never tried to help the situation. So far as explanation or assistance went...

Share