831

[left column]
who have strayed beyond that region, and later, have returned to uplift their
brothers, is so small as to be almost proof of their unworthiness to receive the
training which has been given them.

As a result of such fixity of population the children of the race must get as
best they may, some notion of the whole wide world, while they themselves live in
a section which corresponds in many ways with the land in the memorty of their
ancestral souls. Few are troubled with "wanderlust." Few are explorers. Few
leave home except to wander to some spot which seems by its glare to offer greater
ease or increased opportunities for indulgences. The few that wander through
curiosity or the desire to learn of the world beyond, and then later return to make home
better, are the saving remnant without which there is little hope for progress in
an race.

Children of the African-Amerian are in an undeveloped section, while the country
has almost boundless resources. Can these children grasp the problems of produc-
tion and distribution with the minds accustomed for generations to the bounty of
Nature? How shall such fundamental ideals be presented? How are they being
presented where those children are being taught?

Though citizens of a Nation which owes its existence to the result of humanity's
tendency to universal freedom and a more perfect social state, the Children of
African-American parentage have few rights which men feel bound to respect.
How shall those children be led to appreciate the struggle for liberty and the suc-
cessive solutions of the problems of justice so that they may not unconsciously
become a menace to the perpetuty of the ideas of America, land of the free?

How shall they conduct themselves so that their brothers of lighter hue shall
not arrogate to themselves an authority and disregard for the law, and all law,
which shall eventually destroy the very temple of Liberty? How is that problem
being solved where those children are being taught? Can it be presented so as
to be interpreted by the children except on a basis of African -American history
and literature? Is an African-American adequately and properly prepared to take
his place in American civilization when he has been trained irrespective of the
customs and movements of both of the races from which he has sprung?

Dr. Shaler,2 the veneraable dean of Harvard's Society Department, says: "Man
has reached his present estate through the gateway of his sympathies and by that
portal must he be led onward through life." May it not be the ignorance of race
history and thought which has caused some race leaders to confuse "equality before
the law" with "identically the same?" 3 And has not such confusion resulted in the
undoing of many of their followers?

With an ancestral and a personal contact with little but the raw materials of
commerce, these African-American children live in a land where machinery all
but breathes while it gives a finished product with speed and accuracy at which
the wide world marvels. How is such a problem of the development of acquired
skill be interpreted to minds with creative imagination harnessed to the hand
with a string-instrument and the hoe, or spending itself and its power in voodooism,
conjuration and the fear of death?

Can there be any wonder at the growth and success Tuskugee or the inspira-
tion of Hampton, when such places focus all social influences on the production
of an efficient social unit? Is it any less an education to help a man to help himself
to better his state, than to help him know that he is in need of help? That is the
only difference between the aims of those who favor industrial education for the
African-American children, and those who oppose it.

According to the health reports of the principal Southern cities, African-American
children are predisposed to death from contagious diseases when herded in filthy
living places such as they occupy as a result of their low earning power, yet their
rapid readjustment to new conditions makes them equally healthy when in hygienic
surroundings 4. How shall the problem of sociological substance rather than its
shadow be interpreted to them, who would reather live fleetingly and ill in the
cities' glase, than long and well in rural communities to which they are accustomed?

Interpretation of Nature, N. S. Shaler.
Yale Law Journal, 1909.
Report of Health Officer, District of Columbia, 1007: vol. ii, page 13.
Mortality Among Negroes in Cities, Atlanta Univ, 1896.

^{* 2 Interpretation of Nature, N. S. Shaler
3 Yale Law Journal, 1909.
4 Report of Health Officer, District of Columbia, 1907; vol. iii, page 13.
4 Mortality Among Negroes in Cities, Atlanta Univ., 1896.}

[right column]
Is it not strange that the fear of mob violence in unprotected rural communities
should be stronger than that of more certain death in the crowded districts of the
hostile and unfavorable city? Is it not because the race has not learned of the
value of life and the means of prolonging it, and is not that a problem in the
education of the children?

Because, guided by the most primitive instincts which make them sensitive to the
more undesirable and uneducative impressions, African-American children retain in
their plastic brains all that is most striking and bizarre, while they are dull and
apathetic in the presence of the stern realities and abiding truths of life? How
shall such problems of the mind be interpreted to children with whom thinking is
synonymous with memory, although they live in the midst of a people who have
mechanical appliances to relieve the mind of its burdens and records which reduce
the element of error to a negligible quantiny?

A general apathy makes them indolent and slow in movement, though competing
with people who have harnessed the air and think with the lighining's flash. How
shall such a problem of the will be interpreted to one whose muscular memory of
the fatigue induced by the tropical sun is more potent than the bodys subordinate
position in its relation to the mind?

Because they have spent their years where rhyme and intonation have not been
reduced to syllables and labialization, African-American children are slovenly of
speech and careless of statement. How is such a complex problem of the interrela-
tions of brain, tongue, ear, and throat to be solved to produce that literacy which
characterises the people who use language as a rapier or a sledge, and with it
defend, persuade, or destroy?

It is because the children are sprung from ancestors who were transferred from
barbaric license to the iron-weighted bonds of slavery and thence to the highest
possible freedom of American citizenship, that the emotional basis must be estab-
lished for their language rather than the ideational basis.5 How is the idea of
citizenship to be developed in those who have hardly dared to call their souls their
own while they live in the midst of those who have written every law around
individual liberty and property rights?6

In considering this grave question, prior to my writing, Prof. DuBois says, in his
"Training of Negroes for Social Power: The negro problem is a problem of the ignorance; not simply illiteracy, but an ignorance of the world and its ways, of the
thoughts and experiences of men, an ignorance of self and the possibilities of human
souls. The only remedy for such a condition is the social leadership of the kind
called education by men and women of careful training and broad culture. They
it is we need as teachers and as teachers of teachers. It is, therefore, of crying
necessity among the negroes that the heads of their educational systems, the
teachers of the normal schools, the heads of the secondary schools, the principals
of the public system, shall be unusually well trained, trained not simply in the
common-school branches, not simply in the rechnique of school management and
normal methods, but trained beyond this, broadly and carefully into the meaning
of their age whose civiliration it is their duty to interpret to the youth of this
new race, to the minds of an untrained mass.

Upon such an authority, as well as upon the mother idea in Dr. Washingion's
"Up from Slavery," and upon our own findings the conclusion is indisputable that the
taining of children of African-American blood is the training of a backward race
and that the teachers of such children must begin with them where they find them
and then lead them quickly, surely, accurately and aright to the point where they,
too, may add to the social wealth of the Nation by service to man through love of
God and appreciation and use of Nature. They must interpret the knowledge of
the time no less quickly, surely, accurately and aright so as to lead the children
to the point where they may become in activities, both of expression and of
repression, upright, self-supporting, law-abiding citizens of the Government with
the noblest ideals ever striven for in the whole history of man.

To be a teacher of African-American children is the greatest opportunity for
usefulness granted to men by God, since Moses led the Isrealites from Egypt. It
demands knowledge, so as not to teach a lie. It demands power, so as not to be

5 Science of Thought, Max Mṻller.
6 Actual Government, Hart.

83511