Col-
ored college-bred 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 to-day 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 prevent-
ing the devastations 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 could Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully for
it? If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, minis-
ters, 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 have in the main proved themselves useful
to their race and generation, the question then comes, What
place in the future development of the South ought the Negro
college and college-bred man to occupy? That the present
social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually
yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civi-
lized, is clear.
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