 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Dubois. Music and Text, recorded by Toria's uncle. Chapter 4 of the Meaning of Progress. Do you want to earn your power? Do you want to send them off free of charge? Stand in your shelter. Your spirits are out. They look at us, they enter, they don't feel, they don't cry. Don't let the sad young woman choose. Don't listen to her. Shill her. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought that Tennessee, beyond the Vale, was theirs alone. And in vacation time they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county school commissioners. Young and happy, I too went. And I shall not soon forget that summer, seventeen years ago. First there was a teacher's institute at the county seat. And their distinguished guest 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 remember how, but I wonder, There came a day when all the teachers left the institute and began the hunt for schools. I learned 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 on. Horses were too expensive. Until 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 hill. Sprinkle over hill and ale 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 dark brown 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 Carolinas, 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 peach trees. 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 at the center of the family, always busy at service or at home or berry picking. She was a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her mother, yet faithful too, like her father. She had about her a certain fineness, a 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 know that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side hill. 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 son laughed and the water jingled and we rode on. Come in! said the commissioner. Come in! Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do. I'm going to dinner. What, do you want a month? Oh, Dorei, this is lucky. But even then fell the awful shadow of the veil. For they ate first, then I alone. 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 children. These 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 and backs and at times without legs. They had the one virtue of making naps dangerous, possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted. 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 child woman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly. There were the dowels from their farm over toward Alexandria, fanny with her smooth black face and wandering eyes, Martha, brown and dull, the pretty wife girl of a brother and the younger brood. There were the berks, two brown and yellow lads and a tiny, haughty-eyed girl. Fat Ruben's little chubby girl came with golden face and bold, gold hair, faithful and solemn. Fanny was on hand early, a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl who slightly 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 Laurences, the lazy Niels, unfothered 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 blue-black spelling book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvelous. 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 Lou Jean, whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark red hair uncombed, was absent all last week. Or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mac 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 Lou Jean must mind the baby, but we'll start them again next week. When the Laurences stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book learning had conquered again, and so toiling up the hill and getting as far into the cabin as possible, I put Cicero Pro Archea Poeta into the simplest English with local applications and usually convinced them for a week or so. 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 75 acres of hill and dale that 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 one-and-a-half 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 cromos on the walls and a tired center table. In the tiny back kitchen I was often invited to take out and help myself to fried chicken and wheat biscuit, meat and cornpone, string beans 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 waking. Across the road where fat Ruben lived, they all went outdoors while the teacher retired because they did not boast the luxury of a kitchen. I liked to stay with the dowels, 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 tails. 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. Ruben's larder was seriously limited and herds of untamed insects wandered over the eddings' 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 sewing machine, 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 letter, how the crops failed, and the well was yet unfinished, and finally, how mean some of the white folks were. 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 four room unpainted cottages, some neat and home-like, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but they centered about the twin temples of the Hamlet, the Methodist, and the hard-shell Baptist churches. These in turn leaned gingerly on a sad colored schoolhouse. Hither my little world wended its crooked way on Sunday to meet the other worlds and gossip and wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priests at the altar of the old-time 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 together, but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes, twenty-five 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, some, such as Josie, Jim and Ben, to whom war, hell and slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetite had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awaken thought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the world, and their weak wings beat against their barriers, barriers of caste, of youth, of life. At last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim. 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 passed, 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 school friends. They swept over me a sudden longing to pass again beyond the Blue Hill and to see the homes and the schools of other days and to learn how life had gone with my school children, and I went. Josie was dead, and the grey-haired 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, and Josie toiled a year in Nashville and brought back $90 to furnish the house and change it to a home. When the spring came and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud and full, little Sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with the passion of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter and brought home a nameless child. Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of school days all fled, with a face, wan and tired. Worked until, on a summer's day, someone married another, then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept, and sleeps. I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley. The Laurences 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 Ruben. Ruben 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 plowing corn on the hot hillside. There are babies plenty and one half-witted 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 daughter of Uncle Bird Dowell. She looked somewhat worried with her new duties, but soon bristled into pride over her neat cabin and the tail of her thrifty husband and the horse and cow and the farm they were planning to buy. My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood progress, and progress I understand is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stone still marked the former side of my poor little cabin, and not far away on six weary boulders perched a jaunty boardhouse, 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 mournfully 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 felt glad, very glad, and yet after two long drinks I started on. There was the great double log house 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 gnaught 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 the 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 Carlin, an impudent old skin-flint 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 Carlin'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 Burke's, and an impatience seized me to know who won in the battle. Doc were the seventy-five 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 Burke's. I wished to have a certain magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner. I hurried by the cottage of the misborn Neil 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 Burke's gate, and peered through. The enclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and yet there were the same fences around the old farm, saved to the left, where lay twenty-five other acres, and lo, the cabin in the hollow had climbed the hill and swollen to a half-finished six-room cottage. The Burke's 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. Someday he must stop, for his massive frame is showing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like physique of other days was broken. The children had grown up. Robb, the image of his father, was loud and rough with laughter. Bertie, my schoolbaby of six, had grown to a picture of maiden beauty, tall and tawny. Edgar is gone, said the mother, with head half bowed. Gone to work in Nashville. He and his father couldn't agree. 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 waited, and the merry boy perched behind me, chattered and laughed. He showed me where Simon Thompson had bought a bit of ground in 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 wrote 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 twenty-five, 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 the night fell Uncle Bird told me how on a night like that, Fanny 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 bow-legged brother working and saving had bought for their widowed mother. My journey was done. And behind me lay hill and dale, and life and death. How shall man measure progress there, where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heart-fulls 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 failure, Is it the twilight of nightfall, or the flush of some faint dawning day, thus sadly musing? I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car, end of Chapter 4. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Dubois Music and Text Recorded by Toria's Uncle Chapter 5 Of the Wings of Atalanta Oh, black boy of Atlanta, but half was spoken. The slaves' chains and the masters alike are broken. The one curse of the races held both in tether. They are rising. All are rising. The black and white together with ear. 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 half roused 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 Alleghenies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its sudden 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 touch of reclame, and yet with real earnestness and real sweat. 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 found in it excuse for sulking and brooding and listless waiting. 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 wolf 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 busy Mercury in his coming. And the nation talked of her striving. Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of Dolbyotia. You know the tale? How swore the Atlanta, 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, veil 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 for Adalanta, she ought to have been. Adalanta 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 burst. And in all our nation's striving is not the gospel of work befouled by the gospel of pay? So common is this that one half 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 accursed. 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, serfdom, 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 Adalanta have to flit over all this hollow and hill through sour wood and sullen water, and by the red waste of sun-baked clay? How fleet must Adalanta 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 half-forgotten Apollo of the South, under whose aegis the maiden ran, and as she ran forgot him, as there in Biotia Venus was forgot, she forgot the old ideal of the southern gentleman, that new-world 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. Gold and apples are beautiful, I remember the lawless days of boyhood when crimson and gold tempted me over fence and field, and 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 hippomanies tempt Atlanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal of racing, and not mere incidents, by the way. Atlanta must not lead the South 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 money-getters. It is burying the sweeter beauties of southern life beneath pretense 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 soul life 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 race-childhood. Today, the ferment of his striving toward self-realization 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 lead, 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 some time to discover. Hither has the temptation of hypomanies 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 a 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 well-paid porters and artisans, the businessmen, all those with property and money. And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the other world, goes to the same inevitable change in ideals. The South laments today the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro, a wave of other days with his incorruptible 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, far-off ideal of freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the consequent deification of bread. In the black world, the preacher and teacher embodied once the ideals of this people, the 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 gold in apples before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mamanism of America be added the rising Mamanism of the reborn South, and the Mamanism of this South be enforced by the budding Mamanism of its half-wakened black millions? Whither, then, is the New World quest of goodness and beauty and truth gone glimmering? Must this, and that fair flower of freedom which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings sprung from our Father's 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 by this. 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, sparingly 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 hearts, from hall and street, and from the busy city below, children all dark and heavy-haired, to join their clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a half-dozen classrooms they gather then, here to follow the love-song of Daito, 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 well-worn ways of knowing this queer world. Nothing new, no time-saving devices, simply old-time glorified 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 nourishes. The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing mean or selfish. Not at Oxford or at Leipzig, 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 heart hurting 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 learn of a future fuller than the past and hear the voice of time. And beren solstu, solst and beren. They made their mistakes those who planted fisk and Howard before the smoke of battle had lifted. They made their mistakes. But those mistakes were not the things at which we lately left somewhat uproariously. They were right when they sought to found a new educational system upon the university, where, forsooth, shall we ground knowledge, 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 age, the culture of the university has been the broad foundation stone on which is built the kindergarten's ABC. 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 knowing. Until they had scattered haphazard through the south, some dozen poorly equipped high schools, they forgot to, 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 mother of free work men 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 blacksmith. Almost, but not quite. The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a center of polite society. It is above all to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. Such an institution the south of today sorely needs. She has religion, earnest, bigoted, religion that on both sides of the veil often omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments, 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 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 abundance in the world of work, and until she has this not all the apples of hisperities, be they golden and bejeweled, can save her from the curse of the Boeotian lovers. The wings of Atlanta 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, for our 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 air in human education despising the education of the masses and niggardly 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 and if this is the white south's need and danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedman's sons, how pressing hear 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 & Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas, Tulane, Vanderbilt and the others fit to live. Let us build to the Negro universities. Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad, Howard, at the heart of the nation, Atlanta, at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship has been held above the temptation of numbers. Why not hear, and perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centers of learning and living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the south a few white 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. People must men and nations build, not otherwise, not upside down. 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 knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic, and they whose lot as must have the carefulest training to think a right. 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 philosophers and fobs 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 brick mason, but a man. And to make men we must have ideals broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living. Not sordid money getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for 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 unhampered 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 abortion. 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 yarn gray mist is the tunic of Atalanta pausing over her golden apples. Fly, my maiden. Fly, for yonder comes Hippomenes. End of Chapter 5 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois Music and Text Recorded by Toria's Uncle Chapter 6 Of the Training of Black Men Why, if the soul can fling the dust aside and naked on the air of heaven ride, were it not a shame, were it not a shame for him in this clay carcass crippled to abide? Fitzgerald From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago the slave ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown have flown down to our day three streams of thinking. One, swollen from the larger world here and overseas, saying the multiplying of human wants in culture lands 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 brown men to delve into the formation of beads and red calico cloys. The second thought streaming from the death ship and the curving river is the thought of the older self. The sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle God created a tertium quid and called it a negro. A clownish, simple creature at times even lovable within its limitations, but straightly 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 self-defense we dare not let them. And we build about them walls so high and hang between them and the light of veil so thick that they shall not even think of breaking through. And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought the thought of the things themselves the confused half-conscious mother of men who are black and whitened, crying freedom, opportunity, vouchsafe to us oh 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 impulse within is all wrong. Some mock mirage from the untrue. 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 problem of training men for life. Behind all its curiousness so attractive a like 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 semi-tropics. If deaf to the voice of the zeitgeist we refuse to use and develop these men we risk poverty and moss. If on the other hand seized by the brutal afterthought we debauch this 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 decadence only that saner selfishness which education teaches can find the rights of all in the whirl of work. Again we may decry the color prejudice 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 active 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 coordination of deed is at once the path of honor and humanity. And so in this great question of reconciling three vast and partially contradictory dreams 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 whale of prisoned souls within the veil and the mounting fury of shackled men. 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 a 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 deafness and aim, talent, and character. This program, 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 contingent, the ideal and the practical and workable equilibrium, has been there as it ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment and frequent mistakes. 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 cooperation. 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 in 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 itself saw new obstacles and a field of work ever broader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed and a varying efficiency and grade. The normal and high schools were doing little more than common schoolwork 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 ideal by so much the more became set and strengthened in its racial prejudice and crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom while the marvelous 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 practical question of work, the inevitable economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from freedom and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice, lawlessness and ruthless competition. The industrial schools 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 timeliness. From the very first in nearly all the schools some attention had been given to training and handiwork but now was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct touch with the South's magnificent industrial development and given an emphasis which reminded black folk that before the temple of knowledge swing the gates of toil. 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 civilization 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 sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race and to ask gently but in all sincerity the ever recurring 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 because 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 race prejudices 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 bread winning is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black 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 enthusiasm and sacrifice then the preparation of teachers for a vast public school 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 suitly we have been told that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro to work then simple school should have taught him to read and write and finally after years high and normal schools could have completed the system as intelligence and wealth demanded that a system logically so complete was historically impossible 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 doler brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground 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 working men 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 common school system few held the idea of founding colleges 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 color line 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 theaters in streets and city sections in books and newspapers in asylums 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 it excludes for the present between the races anything like that sympathetic and effective group training and leadership of the one by the other such as the American Negro and all backward peoples must have for effectual progress this the missionaries of 68 soon saw and if effective industrial trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a common school 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 establishment 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 institutions 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 30,000 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 training schools tended naturally to deepen broader development at first they were common and grammar schools then some became high schools and finally by 1900 some 34 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 Spellman's Seminary about 1896 in all cases the aim was identical to maintain the standards of the lower training by giving teachers and leaders the best practicable training 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 broad-minded, cultured men and women to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters but of life itself 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 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 journal voiced this in a recent editorial 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 parrot-like way learning what was taught but not seeming to appropriate the truth and import of their instruction and graduating without sensible aim or valuable occupation for their future the whole scheme has proved a waste of time, efforts and the money of the state while most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme 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 students 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 openness 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 is to listen to evidence 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 thoroughly 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 untouched and this latter question can be settled in but one way by a first hand study of the facts if we leave out of view all institutions which have not actually graduated students from a course higher than that of a New England high school even though they be called colleges if then we take the 34 remaining institutions we may clear up many misapprehensions by asking searchingly what kind of institutions are they what do they teach and what sort of men do they graduate at 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 have placed there grateful memory of their former teacher and friend and of the unselfish life he lived and the noble work he wrought that they their children and their children's children might be blessed 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 sympathy 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 vein glory the teachers in these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place but to raise them out of the defilement places where slavery had wallowed them the colleges they founded were social settlements homes were 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 hearkened in the dawning light in actual formal content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned but in educational power it was supreme for it was the contact of living souls from such schools about 2,000 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 to equal the average of the land 50 years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable numbers to master a modern college course would have been difficult to prove today it is proved by the fact that 400 Negroes many of whom have been reported as brilliant students have received the bachelor's degree from Harvard Yale Oberlin and 70 other leading colleges here we have then nearly 2500 Negro graduates of whom the 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 difficult to get trustworthy testimony and to gauge that testimony by any generally appreciable criterion of success in 1900 the conference at Atlanta University undertook to study these graduates and publish the results first they sought to know what these graduates were doing and succeeded in getting answers for the living 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 53% of these graduates were teachers presidents of institutions heads of normal schools principles of city school systems and the like 17% were clergymen another 17% were in the professions chiefly as physicians as farmers and artisans and 4% were in the government civil service granting even that a considerable proportion of the third unheard from are unsuccessful this is a record of usefulness personally I know many hundreds of these graduates and have corresponded with more than a thousand through others I have followed carefully the life work of scores I have taught some of them and some of the pupils whom they have taught lived in homes which they have build 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 life work or with more consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than among Negro college bread men they have to be sure their proportion of near-duels 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 removed from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and goshery despite the best of training 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 normal schools and academies colored college bread 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 preventing the devastation 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 would negroes do it if they were not trained carefully for it if white people need colleges to furnish teachers ministers lawyers and doctors do black people need nothing of the sort 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 in the main proved themselves useful to their race and then the question comes what place in the future development of the south or the negro college and college bread man to occupy that the present social separation and acute race sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture as the south grows civilized is clear but such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patients 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 suddenly and silently 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 delicatist and nicest in modern history it will demand broad-minded upright men both white and black and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph so for his white men are concerned 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 leaders 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 10th the key to knowledge can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers 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 preclude the south from being as it so largely is simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk such waste of energy cannot be spared the south is to catch up with civilization and as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill unless skillfully 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 new found energies at thwart the current of advance even today the masses of the negro's see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours you may marshal strong indictments against them but their counter cries lacking though they be informal logic have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore oh southern gentleman 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 marriage 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 gentleman have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of melados and written in ineffacible blood and finally when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait they answer that slavery was the arch crime 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 west 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 half trained minds and shallow thinking than from over education and over refinement surely we have with 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 matters little about their brains they already dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for guidance of skilled thinkers the loving reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black many 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 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 centers 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 love and hate and labor in its own way untrammeled alike by old and new such souls a four time have inspired and guided worlds and if we be not wholly bewitched by our wringold 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 girdon for what they lose on earth by being black 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 graciously with no scorn nor condescension so wed with truth I dwell above the veil is this the life you grudge us oh nightly 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 pisca between Philistine and Amalekite we sight the promised land end of chapter 6 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the souls of black folk by W. E. B. Du Bois music and text recorded by Toria's uncle chapter 7 of the black belt I am black but comely oh ye daughters of Jerusalem as the tents of Kidur as the curtains of Solomon look not upon me because I am black because the sun hath looked upon me my mother's children were angry with me they made me the keeper of the vineyards but mine own vineyard have I not kept the song of Solomon 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 villages and lean men loathed 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 360 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 forest to the west here sits Atlanta a 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 center of the negro problem the center of those nine million men who are America's dark heritage from slavery and the slave trade 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 fought slavery against law and gospel circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not calculated to furnish citizens over nice 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 18th century all restrictions were swept away and the slave trade went merely on for 50 years and more 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 Haitian terror of Toussaint was the trade and man even checked while the national statute of 1808 did not suffice to stop it how the Africans poured in 50,000 between 1790 and 1810 and then from Virginia and from smugglers 2,000 a year for many years more so the 30,000 Negroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled in a decade were over 100,000 in 1810 had reached 200,000 in 1820 and half a million at the time of the war thus like a snake the black population writhed upward 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 surely 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 black men yonder and in mine we rumble south in quite a business like way the bare red clay and pines of northern Georgia begin to disappear and in their place appears a rich rolling land luxuriant 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 brand new 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 marble murmurs to the world beyond the Jim Crow car grows larger and a shade better three rough field hands and two or three white loafers accompany us and the news boy 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 fruit trees and dilapidated buildings all the way to Albany at Albany in the heart of the black belt we stop 200 miles south of Atlanta 200 miles west of the Atlantic and 100 miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dourity County with 10,000 negroes and 2,000 whites the Flint River winds down from Andersonville and turning suddenly at Albany the county seat horizon 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 Dourity 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 West 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 100 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 swamp land and here the cornerstone of the cotton kingdom was laid Albany is today a wide-streeted 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 country disgorges itself upon the place and a perfect flood of black peasantry pours through the streets pours, 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 Rhine Falls 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 home happy? well no, not exactly happy but much happier than as though they had not come thus Albany is a real capital a typical southern county town the center of the life of 10,000 souls their point of contact with the outer world their center 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 well nigh forgotten what the country is and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered far and wide over 300 lonesome square miles of land without train or trolley in the midst of cotton and corn and wide patches of sand and gloomy soil 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 10 in the morning bright with a faint breeze and we jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the flint we passed the scattered box like cabins of the brickyard hands and the long tenement row facetiously called the arc 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 ruffled fellow was he and had killed many a nigger in his day 12 miles his plantation used to run a regular barony it is nearly all gone now only straggling 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 farm lore as his nodding crops declare this distressingly new board house is his and he has just moved out of yonder moss grown cabin with its one square room from the curtains in Benton's house down the road a dark cumbly face is staring at the strangers for passing carriages are not everyday occurrences here Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a good sized family and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now the broken staff of the widow he might be well to do they say but he corouses too much in Albany and the half desolate spirit of neglect born of the very soil seems to have settled on these acres in times past there were cotton gins and machinery here but they have rotted away the whole land seems forlorn and forsaken here are the remnants of the vast plantations of the Sheldon's the pellets and the Rensons but the souls of them are past 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 wylam masters yonder stretched the wide acres of Bildad Resor 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 shadow hand of the masters grand nephew or cousin or creditor stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack rent 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 seen no white face a resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cotton fields this then is the cotton kingdom the shadow of a marvelous dream and where is the king perhaps this is he the sweating plowman 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 ensconced by the road and near it a little store a tall bronze man arises 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 he owns 240 acres land is run down since the boom days of 1850 he explains and the 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 gin house with new machinery just installed 300 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 is down to four cents I know how debt sits staring at him 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 slave barons who drove their coach in 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 50s and with the falling prices of the 80s he packed up and stole away yonder is another grove with unkempt lawn great magnolias and grass grown 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 well built negro is he 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 shepherds 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 center of a hundred cabin homes and sometimes of a sunday 500 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 where usually the school is held in the church the churches vary from log huts to those like shepherds and the schools from nothing to this little house that sits demurely on the county line it is a tiny plank house perhaps 10 by 20 and has within a double row of unplanned benches resting mostly on legs sometimes on boxes opposite 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 school house I have seen in Doherty save in town back of the school house is a large house 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 Doherty and we were about to turn west along the county line when all these sites were pointed out to us by a kindly old man black, white-haired and 70 45 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 and baker a widow and two strapping sons who raised 10 bales one need not add cotton down here last year there are fences and pigs and cows and the soft-voiced velvet-skinned young memnon who sauntered half bashfully 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 cotton fields cracking their naked, gnarled fingers toward the border of living forest beyond there's 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 easy chairs and few flowers so when, as here at rodents once he's a vine clinging to a little porch and home-like 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 one-room 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 smooth-faced and diligent of course he is lord of some hundred acres and we expect to see a vision of well-kept rooms and fat beds and laughing children for has he not fine fences and those over yonder why should they build fences on the rack-rented land it will only increase their rent on we wind through sand and pines and plantations till their 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 however 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 there was no place under some weird spell and was half-minded to search out the princess an old ragged black man honest simple and improvident told us the tale the wizard of the north, the capitalist had rushed down in the 70s to woo this coy dark soil he bought a square mile or more and for a time the field hands sang the jins groaned and the mills buzzed then came a change the agent's son settled the funds and ran off with them then the agent himself disappeared finally the new agent stole even the books and the company, in RAF closed its business and its houses refused to sell and let houses and furniture and machinery rust and rot so the water's luring plantation was stilled by the spell of dishonesty and stands like some gaunt rebuke to a scarred land until 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 thread-like pines past a dark tree dotted pond where the air was heavy with a dead sweet perfume white slender-legged 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 white-turbaned and black-limbed 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 Darity 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 Chickasahuachi flows sullenly southward the shadow of an old plantation lies at its edge forlorn and dark then comes the pool pendant gray moss and brackish waters appear filled with wildfowl in one place the wood is on fire smoldering 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 luxurience of undergrowth great dark green shadows fade into the black background until all is one mass of tangled semi-tropical foliage marvelous 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 70 years ago Osciola, the Indian negro chieftain had risen in the swamps of Florida vowing vengeance his war cry reached the red creeks of Daugherty and their war cry rang from the Chattahoochee to the sea men and women and children fled and fell before them as they swept into Daugherty in yonder shadows a dark and hideously painted warrior glided stealthily on another and another until 300 had crept into the treacherous swamp then the false slime closing about them called the white men from the east waist deep they fought beneath the tall trees until the war cry was hushed and the Indians glided back into the west small wonder the wood is red 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 Chikahoochee until by 1860 there had risen in west Daugherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew 150 barons commanded the labor of nearly 6000 negroes held sway over farms with 90,000 acres till land valued even in times of cheap soil at 3 millions of dollars 20,000 bails of gin 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 the lands was tripled it was the heyday of the new voriche and a life of careless extravagance among the masters four and six bob tilled 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 wide-hauled big house with its porch and columns and great fireplaces and yet with all this there was something sorted something 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 receded near a roadside blacksmith shop and behind was the bare ruin of some masters home I've seen niggas drop dead in the furrow but they were kicked aside and the plow never stopped down in the guard house that's where the blood ran with such foundations a kingdom must in time all 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 home place 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 rotted bellows a 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 gandies who 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 End of Chapter 7 Part 1