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 sympa-
thy, the pulse of hearts beating with red blood;--a gift which
to-day only their own kindred and race can bring to the
masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored
children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in
American history, and one of the few things untainted by
sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in these
institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but
to raise them out of the defilement of the places where
slavery had wallowed them. The colleges they founded were
social settlements; homes where the best of the sons of the
freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best
traditions of New England.
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