We shall hardly induce black men to
believe that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about
their brains. They already dimly perceive that the paths of
peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood
call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent
comradeship between the black lowly and the black men
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, and it 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 centres
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; that will love and hate and labor in its own
way, untrammeled alike by old and new. Such souls afore-
time have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not
wholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again.
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